Just For Lookin' Thru

Gerard Depardieu does it the French way

2011-08-18T07:41:00.000-07:00

When thinking of walking in any fine city

It’s always agreed that Paris is pretty

But the stink of men’s piss

And squashed dog crap means this:

A stroll in this city’s quite shitty.

Pity.

Royal Wedding Brilliant Ruse

2011-05-02T15:32:00.000-07:00

Although unusually over elaborate for the army, the Royal Wedding brilliantly disguised the true nature of William and Harry's almost lifelong training for this significant day, distracting almost the entire world. Friends of these blood brothers have revealed that William and Harry had been in arduous training for some years alongside Kath and Pip, for their long planned operation to nip over and assassinate Bin Laden on the night of the apparent nuptials.

It's staggering that this operation has been over six years in preparation. In 2005, as soon as it was known that a fortified mansion was being built for Bin Laden, MI6 sought the best candidates to blast their way in and remove the alleged mastermind of the Twin Towers attack. A long courtship between Britain's two best operatives was set up while the pair were still at University, culminating in the huge event we witnessed on Friday.

It didn't quite go according to plan. Harry almost blew their cover; watched by millions he was overheard saying to William in the Abbey, "There's been a problem with the weather. You're going to have to go through with the wedding night." It was impressive that Kath had got herself seriously thin and fit in order to get into the secure compound in Pakistan - much like her namesake, Catherine Zeta Jones in the Sean Connery film, bending and flexing under and over infra-red security beams. She will make a wonderful military wife, cool under pressure.

However, two days later than planned, the four of them made it in and out of the Bin Laden stronghold without hurting themselves, in only 40 minutes and, with typical British reserve, they have allowed the Americans to take the credit while William and Kath pretended to be having a honeymoon weekend and Harry and Pip dismantled the helicopter and destroyed the evidence, ditching everything in the sea.

With breathtaking audacity, the teamleaders drove off together like any real newly weds in superb Aston Martin, without a bullet proof vest or bodyguard between them, on their way to who knew what fate awaited them in the days ahead. Ably supported by their co-ops, Harry and Pip, these young people have set the standard for confidence and professionalism, and fearlessness in the face of crowd hysteria.

Some Enchanted Afternoon

2010-09-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

The tall young man at the back of the church stands with an air of complete assurance, his height lending elegance to his simple grey lounge suit. His hair has a natural curl, cut short and neat, his face a pleasing mix of even featured attractiveness and authority. He scans the interior, walks with swift, long strides up the aisle to the altar where he confers with an obese man, shabbily dressed in faded black sweatpants and crew neck sweatshirt, his hair and beard greasy. This enormous man is pale, his skin the sickly hue of a corpse beside the pink faced young man beside him and, when the exchange is over, he moves away, slowly pushing the bulk of his stomach ahead of him, breathing with difficulty.

The young man hurries to the back of the church, gives instructions to a pre-pubescent boy, and walks forward to stand beside a fidgety dark haired young man in the front pew. The boy gathers up the orders of service, placing one on each seat and the two men stand together, their backs now to the door. They exchange concerned looks as the dark haired man rummages around in his jacket pocket, perhaps for the third time, and brings out the ring box.

Behind them the congregation gather. No-one is comfortable in their clothes; the elderly seem fragile and weary, the young are bright-eyed and whispering, pulling at their straps and hemlines, some men have the shaven stubble heads of Victorian melodrama convicts, some women display wide and deep chest flesh; thighs gleam below micro skirts and one middle-aged woman’s great slab back strains the seams of her plunge-backed, cream-black, too-tight dress.

The choir is singing now and the attractive long-legged young man swings round a couple of times to glance at the wide-open doors.

The choir finish; the organist pulls out all the stops and waits. There is silence. The empty doorway gapes.

The sound of light feet, and laughter, a swirl of blue, another, another. Hair flying in the breeze, flowers and ribbons flash colour; the bridesmaids run past the open doors in the sunlight. A noiseless, sleek black limousine stops.

The enormous man steps out of the vestry, his bulk now covered with golden-brocade. He promenades down the aisle, fills the doorway, speaks to the bride and her father at length, both invisible beneath his vastness. The congregation shuffle in their seats and he returns up the aisle to stand ready, his too-long hair slicked down against his neck.

The organ blasts. The bride enters the church, her strapless dress tight against her tiny frame, her shoulders burnt Indian brown, and her hair ebony-dyed. She draws close to her fiancé, trembling a little on her high heels, and turns to her bridesmaids. She does not look at her groom, the now solemn-faced tall young man. She is still attentive to her bridesmaids and he glances at the long hem of her dress, kicking aside the train so he can stand closer to her. He stares straight ahead at the priest; he is ready.

She straightens, hands now free of flowers, her face a mask beneath stage make-up. They do not look at one another as the priest begins his reading, intent on their individual discomfort in their unfamiliar clothes, the unfamiliar place and the uniqueness of their situation, this experience they will have only once.

They stand together, their futures stretching out before them, expectant of gravity, wise words and guidance but instead the priest addresses the congregation, over their heads. It is as if the lovers are not there. He tells a story about performing his first wedding as a young, lightweight curate and the ill effects of flash photography on his eyes, blinding him to the rest of the proceedings. As if he is not blind now. He follows this with another rambling request to turn off mobile ‘phones. The couple wait. In this great moment of their lives, when they have come together, to stand before their God, their families and their friends, the great moment of magic and majesty has flown.

The priest reads. The matron of honour reads, speaking chosen words to her two friends, beginning to draw the focus back. The choir sings ‘Down In The River To Pray,’ the harmonies blend and, when the gospel song is almost over, the groom’s throat is moving up and down as though he might choke and, as the choir take their seats, his eyes burn red.

Their hands now joined, and placed on the satin cushion, the tall self-assured young man now steadies himself before his bride, shaking one leg as though he has a cramp in his calf. He straightens and answers, “I will.”

The priest asks him to repeat:

“With my body I honour you.”

The groom looks at her and vows it will be so in a voice that has gaps in it.

The pries dictates: ‘all that I am I give to you.’

Silence.

The priest bends his head towards the young man and gently repeats, ‘all that I am I give to you,’

“I know. I know.” The groom shakes his leg again and straightens up but his voice is broken. “All that I am I give to you.” A hint of sobs breaks into the phrase.

He looks into her eyes again and now they share a smile, “and all that I have I share with you,”

It’s easier now.

“Within the love of God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

When she makes her vows to him, she stares up into his eyes, holding his gaze in hers, her brown eyes huge and dark with intensity and meaning. They hold this look between them that only they can share, this look that travels deeper than flesh, deeper than the knowledge they have of each other and deep into that place which we think we have forgotten but which we know so well, it is home.

LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE. Dir. Julio Medem 1998

2010-05-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

Should have done some research before going to see this because I thought it was going to be about lovers in the Arctic Circle. Instead of being transported to the icy wastes of an unfamiliar landscape the film is set in urban Spain, but in a very cold Spain with wind, rain and everyone in thick jumpers. Shot in near monochrome, the effect is cold and the Spartan interiors of apartments provide a bleak, comfortless setting for love to blossom.

Otto and Ana meet as children and are attracted to each other due to the nature of coincidence, and coincidence plays a large part in the narrative. The two children are engaging and there are some comic scenes between them when young and, later, as teenagers, with trysts in the night and their love kept secret.

However, once they’re older the story loses momentum and, at times becomes surreal and confusing as the viewpoint moves in and out of the two characters’ imaginations.
Otto suffers an extreme grief reaction when his mother accidentally dies but his emotional trauma, based on teenage guilt at his perceived abandonment of her, needs more explanation. Without an understanding of why he feels quite so responsible his behaviour seems unhinged. He also wishes to die and, after surviving a suicide attempt by toboggan, he abandons Ana and disappears, picking up one night stands who he takes home for sex in front of a photo of his mother smiling beside the bedside. The perfect, unchanging mother juxtaposed with tramps.

Overlong at two hours interest in and sympathy for the two characters is lost when the director drops the light comic touches, shifting to a determinedly doom laden scenario . Audience expectation being what it is, one wonders whether the coincidences are piling up so that these two finally will get back together. It’s not to be. Drab and dreadfully slow, scenes that could have been cut detract from those moments of real charm leaving it a patchy affair.

Valentine missing the mark

2010-02-14T07:38:00.000-08:00

Ah, it is Valentine’s Day when thoughts turn to love, and what inconclusive thoughts. Now wouldn’t you have reasoned that, after living on this planet for centuries, a formula could be identified that makes a relationship between a man and a woman take off and work? There seem to be essential ingredients to a good film, a good book, a good job, meal etc.

Let’s take a man’s seduction technique for starters, a little flattery goes a long way. A guy only needs to say, ‘You look lovely,’ with the right look of simple appreciation and, if this is a date, arrive on time to pick her up. Flowers are questionable. If she’s not become keen yet, they can imply too much emotional expectation from you. Plus, she’s about to leave the house, so now she has to go back into the kitchen and fuss around trying to find something to put them in. However, if you’ve come to dinner at her place, they are essential.

In the car, you say, ‘I thought you might like such-and-such-a-place,’ and take her there. You’re giving the strong message that a) you’ve got initiative - a big attraction, and b) you have considered her tastes and preferences – even if it’s not her favourite type of restaurant, considering is the winning ticket.

Beyond these key items; punctuality, attentiveness, initiative and consideration, I’d love to spend an evening with a guy who makes me feel reassured, confident and safe. He’s not going to be making innuendos and suggestive comments all night about his later intentions, and he won’t talk too much about his job.

It also occurs to me that the act of sex itself is something quite different for men and women. For men, it seems to be the end - seek out the target, plan the strategy, begin the operation. Once objective achieved, exit troops.

For women it seems to be a beginning. There’s a lot of browsing, evaluating, looking ahead to see how this is going to pan out over a certain time frame. Will he make a good husband, will he make a good father, is he good company, will her friends/family like him? Is he mean with money? Is he really untidy? Once she decides that she wants to make love with him, she’s beginning something that could last quite a while, maybe till you’re both old. Don’t smirk, it happens. So, if you don’t phone the next day, her ship of love has just been torpedoed. Hard for you to say sorry and climb back aboard the wreck if you’ve made that error. If you only wanted to fire the torpedo, fine, but don’t expect her to understand your short termism.

Maybe we need to adopt a more marketplace attitude to male-female relationships, setting out clearly what we need, what after sales service we expect, and what we’re prepared to pay. But, we’re too dreamy, romantic and optimistic to be businesslike, wondering what the other person may be thinking, trying to second guess and anticipate, when it would be easier and much more honest to openly negotiate.

We could stand in the square every Valentine’s Day each holding a placard and see if we can match up, and I suppose this is why internet dating should work so well, matching expectations and preferences - the only flaw is that people aren't always honest in their negotiations. Perhaps the man-woman transaction is a puzzle never to be solved.

WHAT PRICE LIBERTY?

2010-01-24T01:55:00.000-08:00

A Day to discuss our freedom, privacy and rights - Saturday, 23 January 2010
Chaired by Kate Adie, broadcaster and author

Speakers include:
Henry Porter - journalist, campaigner, novelist
Frederick Taylor - historian and writer of WW2
Katharine Whitehorn - columnist and broadcaster
Oliver Baines - environmental campaigner
Stephen Otter - Chief Constable for Devon and Cornwall
Ursula Owen - campaigner for free speech

Inspired by their visit to The London Convention on Modern Liberty, Jane Turnbull (Literary agent for former publisher) and Jessica Mann (novelist and journalist) decided to hold a conference on the freedom and rights of the British citizen in Cornwall. Concerned by the erosion of Britain’s long tradition of liberty, in response to perceived threats of terrorism, Turnbull and Mann gathered together a panel of writers and thinkers, attracted a huge audience, and enabled a debate to take place.

What a great opportunity to hear a range of opinion, and what a fascinating debate it proved to be. As Chair, the always impressive Kate Adie, warned about complacency, as did Henry Porter who reminded us of the story about the frog: drop it into boiling water and it will jump out; put it into cold water and slowly raise the heat and it won’t notice until maybe too late.

Ursula Owen, co-founder of Virago, and an advocate of free expression asks ‘should we be protected from offence and insult?’ in her talk, the subject being ‘Is offence the new censorship?’ and it’s interesting to look back at some of the colourful insults from Jacobean times where insult slinging was something of a sport, frequent in Shakespeare, and parodied by Monty Python – ‘I squeeze my spots at you’ in the 1970s. Verbal abuse is allowed by ‘characters’ in fiction, on stage and in film, but deemed an offence elsewhere so, for example, where someone may have been described as ‘fat’ prior to the nineteen-eighties, he/she would next be described as ‘clinically obese’ and now perhaps we may have to be simply factual, ie X appears to weigh over twenty stone which, although correct, lacks – to a writer – the satisfying sound and feel of the word ‘fat’ which lands on the page or leaves the lips with a smack. But should any one take offence at a fact? You are fat, you are thin, you are black, you are white, you are mixed race, you smell bad, your ideology sucks. She tells us the lawyer and legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, who is passionate about free expression, says it ‘makes us human,’ and he has some agreement with the idea of censorship, but to be human is to be flawed. We will make mistakes, we will hurt other people, and we must rely on rational law to identify what is seriously an ‘offence’ and what is merely offensive.

Stephen Otter, present in his uniform of Chief Constable of the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary stands before us, open and reasonable, referring to his appearance as that most likely to offer a threat to the audience of some censorship and restriction of our liberties, defusing any suspicion of his presence and motives in his first sentence. Adroit, he points out that our favourite demand of the Police is to make drivers slow down in villages and towns and our most bitter grip against the Police is that motorists are persecuted for driving too fast through villages and towns. There’s the rub. He says ‘we want security and liberty in equal measure,’ and indeed we do. There are two sides to every point debated today.

Everything in life must always be balanced, hence the scales of law. If citizens fail to take responsibility for their own actions and the actions of others, we cannot, like infants, wail until someone else sorts it out: in doing that we relinquish autonomy and hand it, on a plate, to the state. Personal responsibility must sit equally alongside knowing our ‘rights.’ ‘There’s an absence of effective social control,’ says Otter and, it is lamentable that minor authority figures from my childhood and adolescence have now disappeared from our communities, (park wardens, bus conductors, railway station platform attendants, milkmen and newspaper delivery vans, all those working unsocial hours who spotted the unusual and to whom you could turn if there was a problem). In their absence, people need to look out for themselves and, if this makes you want to become a vigilante or get yourself a gun and protect your home from intruders, hold back, you can take these ideas too far in your paranoia. The eyes and ears of the community are now electronic, technology having replaced the human element and, with that, some discernment. A clip round the ear from a park warden would today be seen as assault and it is now impossible to return to the immediacy and simplicity of being shamed by adult disapproval. I got thrown off a bus once, when I was thirteen, with my two friends – our behaviour was very loud and annoying – and we were dumped, very shame-faced, on the roadside between two towns. The double-decker drove off in a cloud of triumphant diesel smoke and we had a long walk home with plenty of time to Think Very Hard About What We Had Done. We didn’t do it again.

Otter’s message is that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, rural communities used to look after themselves – they were also poor, hungry, and had the common lands enclosed and taken away from them, forcing them into the towns but that’s another story. What changed, he says, was that people began to feel that it was someone else’s responsibility to protect them: I would have to think more deeply on this point because it’s hard to say which came first; laws which persecuted the starving for stealing an apple or the perception that the law did, in fact, protect the citizen.

Otter believes that ‘technology has gone too far’ and it’s interesting to think that, because of relatively modern inventions such as television, the car (drinking and driving) and the internet, people stay at home and ‘go less abroad’ than pre-1950 when there were weekly dances, pubs were full and people played cards and made music together, got into brawls and had to get themselves home without public transport of any kind. When they were courting, my father used to walk my mother home from a dance, then walk himself back again, or on another night go on foot and ferry to St Mawes for a dance, possibly fall in the water on the rush to jump back on the boat at the end of the night, but generally take responsibility for himself and the safety of his sweetheart. Today’s knife carrying young men have returned to a form of carrying swords to defend themselves and their beloved’s honour because fist-fights cannot be guaranteed to be one-to-one.

Otter says that ‘people need to feel more confident about helping each other’ and here, I wholeheartedly agree. When I worked in the local NHS hospital I knew of several nurses who would not stop and attend a road traffic accident because of fears of litigation over any first aid mistakes, and this advice is always given in First Aid classes. We are taught how to help and then advised to do nothing until the paramedics arrive so are confused by the contradiction. My personal view is to take the risk and, at the very least, make the area safe, ie stop the traffic and ‘phone for help - but for a medically trained person to drive past without stopping seems to indicate they have surrendered any notion of responsibility in a paralysis of paranoia.

However, taking responsibility for our own security is common sense. Get yourself home safely or, if you can’t, stay overnight where you are and make sure you lock up your house. Otter closes by saying that it is important to ‘keep the spirit of debate open and honest as we are doing today.’ I am reminded that it possible to have laws repealed, that nothing is absolute unless we accept it is so, and that we have minds and voices so that we can use them to attempt to change those things with which we fundamentally disagree, and to come to the aid of others.

There is, however, a very disturbing increase in the officiousness of individuals, highlighted to me when I worked in a large regional theatre. A number of the voluntary stewards took great relish in admonishing and reporting ‘offenders’ for such minor offences as putting their feet on the seats, smoking in the external (semi-open) lobby, taking drinks outside in the street. Eyes glittering, and pulses racing, these semi-elderly women raced up the stairs in the auditorium to catch red-handed anyone taking a photograph of a performer - be very afraid of giving small people power. Kate Adie warns against a mistrust of each other and reminds us that Communist control works by ‘breaking trust within families and communities’ with peer reporting still practised in China. Control is a very psychological sensation, more than it is state directed. There is self-control, family expectation, and community standards which all come before the law and state intervention. In the UK, the loss of that powerful moderator, shame, has led to excesses of behaviour which would not have been so visible only ten years ago.

Yes, I got drunk and threw up in the street before I was twenty, who didn’t?, but the shameful part of that, the loss of self-control that is the leglessness and vomiting was neither routine nor public. That is to say I hoped no-one saw me, hoped anyone who did see wouldn’t remember (or tell my mum whose shame of me would have been deeper than my own), and always wished I hadn’t gone so far – even though I was always fully clothed, and generally jacketed and booted. Today, the fetishistic fleshy exposure of the female body, even in coldest winter, combined with either raucous yelling or it’s opposite, semi-consciousness, possibly preceded by vomiting and possibly followed by a good shag with someone forgettable and possibly Chlamydic, has become a regular Saturday night sight in most towns. The self-policing that is aspiration may be an alternative or would a night in the cells provoke the shame that is absent?

From the floor comes the question: Aren’t we responsible for keeping our own data safe? This has to be a no, because we cannot buy many things using cash therefore our credit card details, name address etc are stored every time we purchase anything online, ie airline tickets, clothes, books, subscriptions, any time we use a credit or debit card for cinema or theatre tickets, or when out shopping – almost everywhere. There are now moves to prevent the use of cheques within five years, making all transactions electronic, recordable and traceable. I recently tried to use cash to pay off my credit card, in my own bank, and was told this is no longer legal – the cash had to be paid into my current bank account and be transferred out to my credit card account (same bank). There is no other purpose to this other than to record customer transactions, perhaps for tax purposes – but the reason given is to prevent terrorism. I can absolutely understand the need to clarify that new bank accounts are opened to bona fide customers and not created for money laundering but, when a customer has had an account with the same bank for over ten years and chooses to make a cash transaction, where’s the terrorism threat?

Henry Porter agrees with Otter that ‘there is a fundamental need to control technology’ but I would argue that there is a deeper need to control the legislators. I grew up through the 1960s and 1970s with the daily, and very real, terror of the IRA atrocities – not only car bombs, hotel bombs but the more personal tarring and feathering, and kneecapping – punishments meted out on a too frequent basis, a terror with me for most of the twenty years it went on. Now, the terrorist threat is less real, more abstract and more random. Because attacks are carried out by single suicide bombers we can only be afraid of a belief system, and of the brainwashing that creates it, the very opposite of the reasons that we are here today – to talk frankly and openly, to debate, to disagree if we choose, to express our own beliefs and accept those of others with what tolerance we can – but not to attack those whose beliefs oppose our own. We cannot legislate against the ephemeral but we can educate, communicate, and lead by example. Children brought up to discuss, question, and challenge ideas will develop confidence in their own powers of reason.

A question from the floor: Apparently, the US teaches Civics and Democracy so why not in the UK? This teaching doesn’t make all Americans open minded and worldly but it may help them understand how their own system works. In the UK we would benefit from debating societies (which many apathetic students will avoid so perhaps formalise to one a term) and less curriculum interference. Teachers don’t have the freedom to let a topic go where it will in a classroom, because of time and curriculum restraints, so perhaps they should be the first to rebel and allow the students to pick up a subject that really interest them and run with it for a while? It’s great learning not tick-box learning.

One participant mentions the phenomenon of the web and mobile ‘phones giving us a perception of being in constant contact with each other. It’s a myth. Although there is now ‘no concept of solitude’ (Henry Porter I think) there is also an enormous sense of social isolation. You could sit alone at home, cruising the web, maybe sending messages but face it – you’re sitting at home alone. Likewise mobile ‘phones – you can send as many messages as you like, you may not get many. The ‘phone acts as a personal EPIRB, a position finding device so you can feel secure (or threatened) that your whereabouts are known as long as you have that ‘phone on you. It is also a prop which prevents the anxiety of abandonment so, the moment a sense of aloneness creeps in, send a text or phone a friend. We are tribal people and a sense of belonging and connectedness is essential to our mental well-being but we need to take care that the use of social networks are for our own amusement and not covert surveillance. There is no need to retain electronic data for years, even when deleted by the users, and the Data Protection Act clearly states that personal data should only be used and kept for the purposes for which it was set up - and destroyed when it is no longer needed. Logically then, once you’ve bought that theatre ticket or the new clothes, and enjoyed the show in your new threads, the electronic transaction and all records relating to you, name and phone number etc, should be destroyed.

Going back to the notion of shame, or embarrassment, Katharine Whitehorn raises her conviction that ‘there are certain things that you don’t do and certain things that you do do.’ This reminds me of the old concept of duty when you followed this notion because of a sense of duty, to husband, to children, to wider family, to society. Duty and allegiance call for some sacrifice as well as providing a notion of pride and belonging. There are codes of honour that have become ritualised in institutions with negative connotations such as the Mafia or the Triads so perhaps an ideal code of honour is self-negotiated and, if you are asked or expected to do something immoral, you find the strength not to do it, even if it makes you a martyr and you get whacked.

A strong warning against complacency comes from historian Frederick Taylor, reminding us of Germany’s decline, using the law, into civic control, and environmental campaigner Oliver Baines advocates we ‘be careful [that] in asserting our freedoms we must safeguard the freedom of others.’ If I am free to drive too fast through villages then you are not free to walk safely along the street. I really must stop doing that.

We know about rendition, we know that the UK has been complicit in the torture of suspected offenders, and we know that anti-protest laws have curtailed our civil liberties, so what do we do to reverse this stealthy State control?

We can write to our Members of Parliament and ask them for some responses:
What is your attitude to the repeal of the Anti-Terror laws?
What is your attitude to ID cards?
How do you feel about trials without jury?

We can also encourage debating societies in schools (and, importantly, at home over the dinner table).

The rights of British people have developed organically over centuries. This needs explanation and understanding. How did we get here? Some of the answers will be painful, including the massacre of protesters and the deportation of thousands. Some of the answers will be inspiring but we learn from our mistakes as well as our successes. The Anti-Terror laws are a mistake, an infringement on the liberties of innocent civilians, and it is time to raise awareness of the erosion of those liberties and take responsibility for our personal behaviour.

It is perhaps now the time to publicly discuss whether we need to enshrine those accumulated rights, and to protect those rights for the benefit of future generations who do not yet know what has been lost.

GLORIOUS 39. Dir Stephen Poliakoff. 2009

2010-01-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

Glorious 39 strips away illusions. Poliakoff presents the apparent idyll of an English aristocratic family headed by genteel patriarch Lord Keyes (Bill Nighy). He presides over a country estate in Norfolk and his elegant townhouse in London – a world of golden light, romantic ruins, servants, house parties and happy children.

But this is 1939, a mere 21 years since the Great War, the war to end all wars, in which millions died, Britain was crippled with war debt, and the English country house system which he so values was almost annihilated. There are many references to the ancientness of his family and tradition, but now, few male servants remained alive or unmaimed to work the English landscape or to be in service to the old families.

Fearing domestic and political upheaval, appeasers such as Keyes sought to prevent Churchill leading the country and taking Britan to war, and to buy off Hitler to preserve British cultural and national identity. Nighty is excellent, controlled, benign. His wife (Jenny Agutter) has absented herself from the family into the garden and the other mother in the film is also virtually invisible. Strangely empty landscapes, buildings and houses add to the discomfort.

Romola Garai plays the much loved, dutiful, adopted daughter who carries the role of hostess with ease and grace, until she inadvertently discovers evidence of something underhand going on in her own home. This is Pandora’s Box; if only she had left the lid on her charmed life would have continued. She becomes alone and friendless, there is no-one she can trust, and the suspense is unrelenting.

Odd sequences with the eerie adolescent boy cause emotional unease which imply supernatural influences simply because he physically couldn’t move around from place to place, soundlessly, in the time allowed. Previously described as a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, events and coincidences are increasingly unnerving and there is always the feeling that the sinister Mr Balkam (Jeremy Northam) is always one step ahead of Anne. But, without Hitch’s touches of humour and romance, the maintained tension is quite hard to bear, at over two hours.

This is a visually rich film, with excellent performances throughout, marred slightly by an unnecessary framing device of a teenager going to visit elderly relatives and asking about the family history and, in particular, Anne (Garai). He needs to be in his forties or fifties for this device to make sense. However, plenty of menace and intrigue and shining a spotlight on the conspiracies at work at the beginning of World War II give much food for thought.

e-Marketing 4

2009-07-13T12:41:00.001-07:00

There’s a sense of urgency about getting people to your website in these cash-strapped times. Once you’ve got them there – a tactical and detailed exercise in itself – you have to keep them there, make them buy something, anything.

The innocent browser will have little idea of the almost-science behind getting any website to sit at the top of the search engine list. If it’s not there, looking as though it’s the biggest shop in the street, browsers won’t bother to search far for it, will get bored and amble off through cyberspace. Opportunity lost.

So how do you get to the top? Like any shop, it’s not enough just to be there, however great your products, your prices, or however smartly you’ve dressed your metaphorical shop window. Reputation counts, having a recognized name, a trusted history.

Beyond that it’s necessary to get yourself noticed by the search engines before the customers can find you. There are things the search engines like, such as links from your website to other top-ranking sites. This gives your site some ‘reflected glory,’ whether or not you are worthy of it. You just need to know the right people. Ask them to place a link back to your site. If they won’t, it’s never going to be much of a romantic partnership, so delete them and move on, find another cyberpartner to boost your ranking.

You can advertise on other people’s sites, on GoogleAds, facebook ads but these will cost. So, if you need to achieve that desirable top-of-the-list celeb glow, you’re going to have to get yourself a web-savvy copy writer. Keywords, that’s the thing.

Forget reams of text, pages of waffle, fluffy descriptions of your stuff. If you want to shift the gear, select a few well chosen words, put them in the right place, and you’re away. (Discovering the weird and random words web browsers type into the Google search box can lead you to a strange world but you’ll never have to meet them.)

Remember that search engines have some old fashioned values, such as preferring honesty, clarity, simplicity, and ethics. Tell it like it is. State what you’re selling, build your website so visitors can nip round it in a trice, find exactly what they want, hit the BUY NOW button, and be off - result. Every visit and every click monitored, recorded and analysed for your statistical satisfaction.

Oh, and another thing, the buzz word these days is ‘interactivity,’ so connect your site up to facebook and twitter and let your customers tweet away to each other about you, and your products. Sweet talk or scandal, get a dialogue going, entice them back to your cyberlovenest, seduce them with your special offers, and clinch the deal.

NB Training from Rob Edlin of Niddocks, based on The Lizard, Cornwall - internet marketing for businesses large and small.

e-Marketing 3

2009-07-11T12:29:00.000-07:00

Stafford Sumner of www.jarrang.com gives an overview of e-Marketing. jarrang don’t bother with social media but specialize in email marketing, business to business, using mailing lists.

They have led hundreds of campaigns and sent millions of emails on behalf of their clients and have proved that email campaigns are:

Cost effective, immediate, flexible, interactive, measurable and environmentally friendly.

Targetted emails are welcome whereas Spam is a nuisance so it’s important to research your mailing list, discover what the recipients are interested in, either hobbies or products, and narrow down the list so the campaign is more likely to hit interested people – and not be deleted before reading. Some companies opt to supplement email campaigns with occasional high quality postal mailings, ie brochures- their promotional material sending a tangible message of quality and style.

This is a sophisticated method. The measurable element includes basic statistics such as how many emails were sent and at what time, then quantifies how many of those were delivered, bounced back, opened, read, how many were ‘clicked through’ to the company website or unsubscribed. Conversion is hard to quantify (so don’t promote this to possible e-Marketing clients) but reports can show how many browsers then went on to buy from the website, and how much they spent, calculating an average spend, or how many looked and left.

Known percentage rates inform whether each campaign is successful so the approach can be varied, ie trying a different time of day, writing a more attention-grabbing, irresistible header, making buying easy when the website is accessed. Analysis of each campaign is essential. Less than 10% failure is fine, 15-30% view rate is good, above 30% view rate is very good.

Foisting your products onto people is not only irritating - speculative emails are illegal unless they are business-to-business. The consumer will choose to look for your type of product and the web is a shop window. If your website persuades browsers to sign up for emails or newsletters then you’re fine to contact them until they unsubscribe. It’s important to put the recipient in control.

Note – avoid sending out a campaign after Christmas and big spending (utility bills in Jan too) or at the end of the month, but try soon after pay day.

e-Marketing 2

2009-07-09T12:45:00.001-07:00

Toby Parkins of http://www.uknetweb.com/ says be networking savvy with social media as well as business media. It’s no good using LinkedIn to ask frivolous questions such as ‘Hey, dudes, how’s the surf looking over at Porthtowan?’ You’ll be ticked off, ‘go to facebook’ and quite right. facebook is a place for friends, acquaintances, people you once met on holiday, or spent time with at college – fine for catching up with any news but less about making good business contacts.

Linkedin is for AB users, 35-50 years old and wanting to use the site to make those good business connections and promote their own business, and you can manage your company’s reputation by monitoring www.twitter.com – the microblog site for brief updates (facebook also show status updates). Select all comments about your subject, sign up for google.com/alerts and twitter alerts. This way, you can begin new relationships with people who twitter, increase sales, and act fast to respond to postings, engage with complaints, and create opportunities to enhance your reputation.

facebook is useful for the lighter hearted stuff so no harm in posting that you’re on holiday, spending some time on a course, or maybe researching something interesting to your own business or that of others. That kind of information could prove useful. Loading up your business logo instead of a picture of grinning students will help with credibility.

Use http://delicious.com/ as a fantastic resource research. Here you can look to see what people have shared and save hours in your own search of the internet for the best whatever-it-is-you’re-looking-for. Technorati is a useful blog search engine so search this to find postings that relate to your work or interests.

Using social media will help your business to identify your audience and aim messages at them, so select the correct types of media for your service or product. Find out exactly where your future customers hang out in cyberspace depending on their interests, ie travel, dance, sci-fi, food, or various sports. If your business is surf wear or surf boards, try checking ‘best break’ sites, ‘best beach’ sites etc. Catch the hobbyists and make them your target market.

e-Marketing 1

2009-07-08T10:48:00.001-07:00

gendall is a design consultancy based in Falmouth, Cornwall. Darren explains how to transmit a compelling company message across multi-media:

Firstly, it’s essential to understand the brand. What voice does it have? Is it quirky and funny, elegant and classy, or practical and no messing?

Secondly, this message needs to be designed and written in a fitting style and tone. Are the photographs transmitting the same message as the text? Quirky images and funny text or perhaps stylish photography and smooth prose.

Thirdly, get the message out. So what’s the best way? Always holding the ‘character’ of the brand in mind, everything has to match; the website, links to Facebook and twitter, brochures and mailing material, flyers and posters.

Sound simple? Hardly. Step one means taking the time to thoroughly understand not only the product, but the entire company and the guiding principles of the boss/es. This includes their personal values, such as whether their driving principles are money or perhaps the environment, and what is their behaviour. If this is a green company, do the directors drive low emission cars? Or, if the main man is striving for a silky, corporate image, perhaps he slides into work in a long, shiny black sedan with an engine so quiet it barely purrs.

Check out their attitude, from the company bosses, through admin staff to catering. For that company message to be as accurate as possible, and to send a clear, congruent message, all those staff need to be singing the same song. So, get them together; pack them in a room and throw questions at them, play games with them, watch and listen as they build strong teams and sharpen up.

Finally, when you’ve put away all the coloured paper, glue and glitter pens, flipchart brainstormers and dirty coffee cups, you should all have the same sense of who/what that brand voice is. It’s a character on its own. It has personality. All the rest follows.

Note: Brands to look at for clear messaging and style

http://www.duchyofcornwall.org/aroundtheduchy_duchycottages.htm http://www.pendennis.com/

LAST CHANCE HARVEY. Dir Joel Hopkins. 2009

2009-07-02T13:13:00.000-07:00

Loser Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman) heads for London to attend his daughter’s marriage to a young man he’s never met. Estranged from his family, and close to being dropped from his jingle writing job, his isolation is flagged up by him being booked into a second rate hotel alone while the rest of the wedding party are all bonding in a rented house.

Singleton Kate Walker (Emma Thompson) works at Heathrow and gets set up for a wretched blind date by a work colleague which only reinforces her sense of separation.

Harvey flies into London and he and Kate miss each other twice. They meet only at the point when Harvey is sufficiently humiliated to feel the need to offload to a stranger and she’s it. Kate persuades Harvey to return to the evening wedding reception and he takes her along. Buoyed up by her presence, Harvey does the right thing at last, reclaims his dignity, the love of his daughter and some respect from his ex-wife.

Billed as a romantic comedy, there are comic moments but something fundamental is missing here. This pairing doesn’t work. London is filmed at its beautiful best, edging towards Autumn, as the pair walk along the South Bank, but to carry the audience into the illusion that Hoffman and Thompson could fall in love, some emotional manipulation would have helped suspend disbelief. Harvey’s wedding speech, however well judged, is not enough to make a strong, modern woman fall at his feet.

Good performances from both actors, and a particularly fine moment from Emma Thompson, excellent throughout, when she drops her reserve and displays her vulnerability and fear. Superbly done.

As Harvey is supposed to be a jazz pianist, and loves writing jingles, music could have been used to good effect to influence the mood of the piece, manipulate the audience, and carry us with the characters as they fall for each other. In one scene, instead of calling to her, Harvey plays the piano, captures her attention and softens a moment when her jaded resolution has reasserted itself and this works quite well. In another scene a lively band makes them laugh and move in response, changing the energy momentarily and, of course, there is dancing at the wedding. But weddings are soon eclipsed by real life and we need to be more certain that these two hit it off.

GENOVA. Dir Michael Winterbottom. 2008

2009-06-28T06:50:00.000-07:00

Colin Firth is cast as single dad again, a role he plays convincingly. Recently the slightly harassed father of two small children in ‘Then She Found Me,’ this time his daughters are older, 10 and 16 at a guess, and his concerns are different for each one.

Tragically widowed, he’s offered a change of scene – to leave the US and take up a teaching post at a University in Genova, maybe too early for his stunned daughters. His approach to them both is sensitive and relaxed but each character copes very separately with the sudden loss of wife and mother.

The youngest girl is traumatized by feelings of guilt, an astonishingly natural and convincing performance drawn from Perla Haney-Jardine. Disturbing hallucinations cut her off further from her father and sister and, during occasional nightmares, her distress is searing. The older sister (Willa Holland) detaches herself from her father and sister, sampling the Mediterranean life of sunshine and sex, disguising her fragility by playing the epitome of cool.

Striking cinematography puts the audience firmly in the characters’ various viewpoints; we walk the streets of Genova looking up at the buildings, taking narrow dark alleys, losing our way, and Winterbottom’s direction creates a strong sense of unease, uncertainty, and vulnerability.

This is a film in which not a lot happens but it’s cinema as a sensory experience, visual and atmospheric, using light and shadow, inducing claustrophobia, building tension. The climax is necessary and important, in a scene of chaos and threat, of city traffic and panic, and the very real possibility of a second disaster, awakening the older sister to the central issue facing them all, the family is pulled back together. Very fine, realistic, and sensitive.

FAR NORTH. Dir Asif Kapadia. 2008

2009-04-01T13:17:00.000-07:00

Sara Maitland’s short story is set in the Arctic, filmed in barren icescapes and stony shores. Saiva (Michelle Yeoh) has cast herself out into the cold wilderness, cursed: all who love her are doomed, so she keeps moving, away from people, eking out her existence. Her only company is a baby she saved from a massacre when she was a young woman, and the girl is now full grown.

The two women hunt seals, birds, deer, and keep warm under layers of wolfskin, pitching their yurt in bleak landscapes amidst the Arctic winds. The silence of the film is calming, the script is almost wordless, but the cinematography is rich with facial expression and graphic killing scenes.

The film opens with Saiva hungry to the point of desperation. Cradling the head of one of her dogs, she soothes it, caresses it, then cuts its throat. The meat is tough but the two women have to live.

Into this menacing territory stumbles Loki (Sean Bean), close to death and at their mercy. Saiva’s curiosity about this ill equipped man is her weakness. She saves him, tends him and he tells her he is an escaped POW, on the run after being ordered to kill women and children. Soldiers venture into the icy wastes to track down and kill the nomadic people but Saiva and her adopted daughter have managed to evade them.

Two women and one man in a small tent... it seems that Loki is warming to Saiva but, when the daughter notices, she competes, and wins. Young, pretty and flirtatious, unbroken by tragedy, she and Loki become lovers and plan to leave the lifeless ice to seek a community where they can raise a family.

In this astonishing film, Saiva gives Loki life and he repays her by taking from her what is most precious, company. She stands alone, bereft. The climax to this story is unexpected, shocking and macabre.

GRAN TORINO. Dir Clint Eastwood. 2008

2009-03-13T06:00:00.001-07:00

Some stereotypes appear early on in this film about modern survival in America but these are soon forgotten as the story develops. Clint Eastwood acts and directs in this film about immigrants, attracted to play the part of the newly widowed Walt Kowalski. A Korean war veteran, he is deeply resentful of his Hmong neighbours, angry at the fall in standards, the unkempt lawns and houses, and by being surrounded by people whose culture he does not understand.

America is changing, Walt is Polish and prejudiced but he goes to an Italian-American barber, is friendly with an Irish building foreman - his friends are all earlier immigrants or economic migrants from Europe. His new neighbours are Hmong, the teenage son, Thao, is meek, and Walt has no desire to understand them. However, they are forced together. The lad is persuaded to try and steal Walt's vintage car, a 1972 Gran Torino but Walt, being Clint, is no crime victim.

During an interview on Radio 4’s Front Row, Eastwood explains that the Gran Torino of the title stands for America’s manufacturing past, looking back to a time of pride in craftsmanship, production line team work, the American automobile dream. This needed to be made more obvious with perhaps some dialogue about what it was like working in the factory producing these cars. It is referred to but not enough to wallop the viewer with its significance.

The teenage daughter, Sue, acts as intermediary between vintage veteran Americanised Walt and her own family and culture. However, more than simply educating the die-hard Walt into an acceptance, understanding and respect for the Hmong way of life and their need to resettle as his forebears once had, the Hmong family learn something from him.

Walt is alienated from his sons and, partiaularly his grandchildren. The presentation of grand-daughter Ashley is overdone as she turns up at her grandmother's funeral inappropriately dressed and her attitude is disrespectful and slovenly. Where Walt is meant to look dated, she merely appears insensitive and brattish. The opening funeral scene has his two sons speaking about him in church, it's exposition which makes them seem callous when they surely would be grieving for their own mother. Shifting that dialogue after the service would have fitted better moodwise.

A young Priest frequently calls round trying to extract a confession from Walt but confessing's not in his range. Neat touches are the classic, snarling Eastwood - Josey Wales or Dirty Harry style - prepared to fight for his principles, and the barbershop scene. Walt is close shaved, cleaned up and even gets a new suit to be ready for his Day of Judgement. This is an enjoyable morality tale about growing up, taking responsibility and not complaining. When it comes to the climax, Walt uses the power of American law to solve the neighbourhood problem, and his own, yet with all guns blazing.

SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. Dir Danny Boyle. 2008

2009-03-10T13:59:00.000-07:00

Stunning cinematography of slum life in India, oblique camera angles, great colour and lively footage of laughing, running children. The boy Jamal and his brother live in flimsy shacks, making small amounts of money any way they can. Orphaned when a gang kill their mother, the boys take off and live amongst the mountains of rubbish, grubbing around for survival. It is unclear why Jamal’s brother is unkind to the little girl who attaches herself to them but Jamal is sympathetic towards her and, for a time, they travel together.

After a short, calamitous and fascinating life, the teenager Jamal is a contestant on ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire’ watched by most of the country. He answers each question correctly, as each one is relevant to an episode of his extraordinary life. This gets him arrested for cheating because the quiz show doesn’t have the funds to pay his prize (although the reason for his arrest is not made clear in the film, and the clever reason for Jamal needing to confront the quiz show host is avoided altogether).

This adaptation is fairly closely based on Vikas Swarup’s examination of Indian poverty but Beaufoy’s screenplay omits the incest, rape and violence of the original, and the rescuing ‘angel’ of a young woman solicitor, replacing her with a policeman. Beaufoy has dropped the novel's casual, domestic cruelty and inserted mafia style gangsters for tension in its place. In doing this the story has suffered somewhat.

It’s true that the original Q and A (now changed to Slumdog Millionaire like the film) has an implausible plot and is so full of extraordinary coincidences that it has a magical feel at times. However, in tinkering with the story, merging two female characters into one love interest, making the two friends into brothers and mixing up the bad guys, the neatness of the novel’s tie up is lost.

One section of Swarup’s novel is the realistic, painful portrait of a young girl put into prostitution by her own family, a traditional form of wage earning for her tribe, and who is managed by her pimp brother. The boy, Jamal, meets and comes to love her, and eventually marries her. Boyle chooses to avoid offending Indian sensibilities and has criminals make a whore of her when the truth of this cultural abuse is bad enough. The cruelty she suffers from Jamal’s brother makes no sense, as Salim rejects her, then rapes her, then captures her and slashes her face, then frees her. Salim is equally contrary towards Jamal, but why? There is none of this schizoid behaviour in the novel, and no suicide either and the two lovers go free as though gangsters would ever allow them to get away. Preferable was the clever tie up by Swarup in which one of Jamal’s employers (who turns out to be a hit man) is tricked into killing the creepy Fagin character who has been maiming street children so they could beg for him, and eliminating any threat.

Boyle captures great vitality in the footage of the children in the early part of the film and filming is outstanding, but working gangsters into the plot makes a muddle of the story.

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA. Dir Woody Allen. 2008

2009-03-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

Love and sunshine for Vicky and Christina, two young American girls spending a summer in Barcelona. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is engaged and has come to stay with a family friend whilst doing research for her thesis. She is confident, mature and not to be trifled with. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is unattached, sexually available, sexually uninhibited and keen to be trifled with. When the two girls are approached in a restaurant by bohemian artist Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) with a direct offer to come away for the weekend with him and enjoy a sexual threesome, Cristina is game.

Vicky agrees to go along as chaperone but barely tolerates Juan Antonio’s well rehearsed seduction techniques and apparently innocent openness. Cristina slips upstairs to his room for some eagerly anticipated lovemaking but falls ill and spends the weekend alone in her own bed, throwing Vicky and Juan Antonio together.

Rebecca Hall is excellent as the modern, educated young woman with a life plan, a strong interest in her career and a sound understanding of human behaviour. Acerbic and impatient at first, she begins to see a more appealing side to Juan Antonio when he stops playing the Lothario. Bardem clearly relishes the opportunity to play the relaxed seducer after his chilling performance in ‘No Country For Old Men,’ and exchanging the psychotic coldness of that role for a mischievous warmth and sensitivity.

Johansson is underused, playing the sexy girl again when she is capable of far more. Woody Allen used her well in ‘Match Point’ where she played a dangerously neurotic femme fatale but here, she merely has to be aimless and discontented. Penelope Cruz is sultry and glowering as the unstable ex-wife, Maria Elena, pouting and storming, outspoken and fragile as a child, and Chris Messina gives a natural and realistic performance as Vicky’s new husband.

Despite the intrusive voiceover, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is funny and touching with an ironic perspective on sexual etiquette and morality, and the photogenic cast and sunny locations are a visual holiday.

CONVERSATIONS WITH MY GARDENER. Dir Jean Becker. 2007

2009-02-08T04:14:00.000-08:00

Subtle, simple story written and directed by Becker about male friendship in rural France. A middle-aged, middle-class Parisian artist (Daniel Auteuil) returns to his boyhood home in the country – he is separated from his wife, his girlfriend has been cheating on him and his relationship with his daughter is strained. Both his parents now dead, he escapes from the difficulty of relationships with women and settles into his old family home to paint.

He decides to breathe life into the place again and advertises for a gardener to restore the extensive gardens. (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) arrives on a rickety looking velo, and the two men recognize each other from early days at school. They seem only to have their shared beginning in common, their experiences and outlook on life are so different, but the two men become friends, gradually understanding each other’s perspective and developing a frank intimacy.

Although ultimately the artist’s journey is one of redemption and transformation, there is delightful humour, poignancy, and quiet philosophy without sentimentality. Becker has drawn performances of very natural ease from Auteuil and Darroussin, the pace is as leisurely as summer in the country, and makes a charming, touching film.

T C Boyle. Talk Talk. London. Bloomsbury, 2006

2009-01-27T11:11:00.000-08:00

Boyle pits victim against criminal in this dual perspective novel about identity theft. Dr Dana Halter is deaf, and a teacher of the deaf, living her life to the full, working, engaged to Bridger, a computer graphics film editor, and attempting to write a novel about language based on a historical figure – the mute wild boy of Aveyron. Always running late, she gets pulled over for a minor traffic violation and she is plunged into chaos. Someone has been using her name and is wanted all over the States for various felonies.

Already a character with attitude, Dana’s steady anger at the world and everyone in it escalates when she is thrown, pitilessly, into jail for the weekend where she suffers indignity and humiliation. Her rage continues unabated throughout the novel as she obsessively tracks the fraudster who is to blame, forcing her fiancée to accompany her on her quest for revenge. Fiancée Bridger is unfailingly supportive and kind, but she gives him nothing. Nowhere in the entire story does she soften, show herself capable of any warmth and, the one time she smiles, it is in the mirror at herself.

William Peck Wilson adopts a bewildering variety of personae, moving from one person’s credit to another. Astonished and enraged when he realizes the real Dana is onto him for his use of her name, credit and reputation, he childishly takes on the ID of her fiancée, Bridger, whose credit isn’t that great and certainly not up to the champagne lifestyle that Peck lives. It’s short lived tit-for-tat before Peck has to change identity again. Haute cuisine, designer shades, silk suits and top of the range cars fit Peck’s image of himself as a sophisticated connoisseur.

Protagonist and antagonist are well matched. Both are egotistical control freaks but it is easier to like Peck, not because he’s a calculating thief with martial arts skills that can kill a man, but because he’s admirably clever and because he loves so much. He loves his fiancée, his daughter, wine, beautiful clothes and food, everything in the world that is finely made. Dana loves only herself, she has no friends and a boss she hates. Boyle tells us repeatedly that she feels angry, frustrated, irritated. He has created a character it is impossible to like or with whom to sympathise.

Every time she hardens her face at gentle Bridger, shuts him out, maintains a furious and repellent independence, the reader questions what he sees in her. He says to his mother that Dana is ‘awesome’ but the reader sees no evidence of this. She is determined and single minded. It’s hard to believe that her abhorrent characterisation is deliberate but, as T C Boyle is a master of fiction, and he portrays her as a woman with no friends this has to be intentional. Late in the novel he springs the surprise of her memory of playing with her four brothers as a child but they are nowhere in the story and her relationship with her mother lacks warmth. Peck, her adversary, however, has everything to lose.

The pursuit story fails to deliver at the end but Bridger gets his job back. He should have earned a lot more for his pains.

THEN SHE FOUND ME. Dir Helen Hunt. 2008

2008-11-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

Generally implausible. Unlikely marriage followed by unlikely affair. April (Helen Hunt) marries Ben (Matthew Broderick), a Jewish boy with arrested development. She is almost 40 and desperate for a baby, and their odd relationship indicates lust for each other although they are unable to communicate, despite supposedly being best friends.

Ben leaves her and goes back to mother. That same day she meets Frank (Colin Firth) and within a few days is in love with him but she still wants to have sex with her estranged husband. Already neurotic and fragile, her adoptive mother dies, leaving April with a lot of emotional baggage to deal with. But this is not all. Her birth mother, Bernice (Bette Midler), has tracked her down and wants a reunion.

This set up is perfect for a farce and there are light moments. April initially doesn’t believe Bernice is her mother and gets pretty stressed about the near-stalking. Understandably attracted to Frank as the only stable character in this scenario, April says she is in love with him with in a few days of meeting him. Now, this can happen, but not with these two. This story would have been so much more powerful if their relationship had been based on simple, trusting friendship.

Hunt's directing debut is fine but miscasting disappoints. Sadly, despite being obliged to fake sex for the benefit of the sated voyeur, there is no on screen chemistry between them. Both actors are individually impressive but they don’t gel. Firth is always good but there is a feeling of weariness here, as though he knows these two characters would never get together and he’s slightly embarrassed about the charade.

Direction focuses mostly on the realistic – scenes in school, in the road, with Frank and his sleeping children, all well done and plausible. However, expecting an audience to believe that Bette Midler could be Helen Hunt’s mother is bizarre. Even though Bernice was supposed to be 15 when she gave birth to April this is stretching credulity beyond its limits.

As far as the story goes, Elinor Lipman’s tale of abandoned child and reunited birth mother is reasonable. April is suspicious of her mother’s motives, and angry at being given up for adoption. Oblique dialogue employed to create tension is overused so straight answers to straight questions would be welcomed.

The penultimate scene in which April reappears in front of Frank’s house, ostensibly to apologise for treating him so badly, would have been better omitted. Frank has been thoroughly decent throughout, scarred and sensitive, always kind to her – and yet she stands before him, not apologizing, but delivering a lecture on how she will hurt him again and again. Instead of legging it, he says lamely, ‘Oh shit,’ or something equally banal to demonstrate that they are so hopelessly in love with each other that they’re stuck with this unhealthy situation.

Hunt is likeable as April, and Frank is kind, but the eccentric Bernice is too brash for their sensitivities. Offered as light relief from the ‘desperate-for-a-baby’ neurosis, it grates. April is raw and needy, Frank is tired and muddled, and doing his best to cope with two small children. The last thing he needs is an angry, hormonally disturbed older woman. Everything is unlikely.

I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG. Dir Philippe Claudel. 2008

2008-11-22T08:24:00.000-08:00

Kristen Scott Thomas plays Juliette, a woman just released from prison after serving 15 years. Reunited with her much younger sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), Juliette tries to find where she fits in with her family and the outside world.

When first seen, Juliette looks depressed, is silent and withdrawn, and almost hostile to her younger sister’s attempts to integrate her into her own warm family set up. It is not clear for a while where she has been, why the sisters are estranged, and why Juliette seems so resentful. Léa’s husband, Luc, is suspicious and family tensions are nicely observed.

With little dialogue and a strongly visual emphasis, the narrative flowed a bit slowly at times and the reason for her imprisonment could have come a bit earlier. Only one scene in the entire film was clumsy exposition, with the awkward attempt by a social worker to draw out Juliette. Deeply wounded and fragile, she is too intelligent to be befriended by a busybody, however well meaning, and her experience too devastating for a girlie chat.

Her probation officer talks openly to her about his own disaffection, as if he seeks the intimacy that she shuns. This man with the open manner, beautiful eyes and expression fails to move her but she learns that the unhappiness that he chatters about so easily masks a deeper pain than her own. When she finally tells her story, in a powerful scene with Léa, their mutual pain is searing, and makes a striking and dramatic contrast with this otherwise quietly paced film.

Acting is very fine by the whole cast. Scott Thomas is deep, strong but damaged and Zylberstein has endless charm and exquisite sensitivity. This is a very sad, intimate story handled with great sensitivity.

QUANTUM OF SOLACE. Dir Marc Forster. 2008

2008-11-06T06:13:00.000-08:00

Casino Royale left Bond wanting revenge. QofS follows up with a frenzied opening car chase sequence, with Bond in the Aston screaming through tunnels, round bends, getting shot at and, eventually delivering his cargo. The unusual thing about this car chase is the camerawork. Rarely seeing whole vehicles, jigsaw close-ups of tiny bits of cars are slammed at the audience. This dizzying, anxiety inducing onslaught feels like being repeatedly hit in the face and deafened at the same time.

Several times the cinematography mixes two dramatic events together, ie a horserace above ground with an interrogation below. The result is confusion and disorientation and is reminiscent of the noise and colour of carnival intercuts from early Bond movies. QofS incorporates motifs from other Bond classics – a flight battle in mountainous terrain and a speedboat pursuit.

However, QofS omits the humour, the characterisation, the sexiness, the glamour, and a storyline. There is little sense of who these people are. Taking out the sex and graphic violence (as in Casino Royale) drops the rating down to a 12A which makes it clear that the audience for QofS are adolescent boys. Lots of explosions and noise, stunts and breakages, and no girly stuff like conversation. QofS lacks the humanity of Casino Royal, perhaps simply because no-one eats, sleeps or has sex. Bond does, apparently, have sex with an agent within an hour of meeting her but there is no sense of flirtation or mutual attraction, no seduction, and she supposedly succumbs to his line, ‘I can’t seem to find the stationery. Will you help me look?’ How could any girl resist?

In the few opportunities Daniel Craig is given to act, he is superb. The frenetic pace slows in a few places, enough for one scene following an air crash in which he and the Bolivian female agent show they both have scores to settle, another when he demonstrates enormous compassion when she is terrified, (lifted from the shower scene in Casino Royale), and the third when he is tender with Mathis. It’s a pity to waste a talented actor like this. Craig is more than just a fit, effective body and QofS portrays him as a machine who is immune to injury despite falling from heights many times, surviving car crashes, explosions and burning buildings. Judi Dench’s M has been rewritten as motherly, indulgent, and somewhat fragile rather than authoritative and waspish.

Hugely reliant on exciting stunt work, fight sequences are so close-shot and intercut it is impossible to see who is hitting who, who’s falling, who’s been shot, and why. There is some brief politico-economic discussion about land ownership which means that the bad guy gets to charge what he likes for water but these scenes lack tension. The script doesn’t provide verbal or psychological sparring, the threats are only physical. Oh, and the double agents are all British.

MARRIED LIFE. Dir Ira Sachs. 2007

2008-10-13T15:22:00.000-07:00

Stylish, melodramatic story about the perils of desire, with elements of noir and dark humour.

Harry (superbly played by Chris Cooper) is married to Pat (Patricia Clarkson) but his contented home life with her lacks romance. He falls for young, sweet Kay (Rachel McAdams) and decides that he will have to kill his wife to spare her the pain of him leaving. Cue an element of farce.

Neither scheming nor worldly, McAdams’ femme fatale is an innocent, but she is still the prize that can drive a man to commit murder in order to claim her. Pierce Brosnan plays Harry’s deceptive, predatory male friend, out to steal the girl, and he narrates the voiceover as homage to 40s and 50s suspense movies.

Deftly handled by Sachs, wonderfully shot, and beautifully styled in 1949 sepia tints, beiges and greys, post-war neat and tidy corporate America is a real treat. Period detail and accessories are spot on. Quality film-making, delightful intrigue and great fun, all in one package.

ELEGY. Dir Isabel Coixet. 2008

2008-10-12T12:12:00.000-07:00

If you can stomach the soft porn indulged in for the first part of this film, it becomes an interesting examination of the Western fixation with the body, youth and sex. Focussing on decaying flesh and men’s attitudes towards ageing, it also gives charming insight into male friendship.

Student Consuela (Penelope Cruz) has her kit off a lot so that her professor Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) can enjoy the pleasures of her fresh flesh, so we have to endure it too. The point laboured here is that she is youthful and beautiful, and her ageing lover feels very insecure about his maturity in comparison.

The age gap doesn’t bother Consuela, however. The problem is all in Kepesh’s psyche. She loves him but he keeps her at an emotional distance whilst being possessive, jealous and neurotic about not being worthy. His certainty that the affair is doomed prevents him enjoying it, and seals their fate.

He does have uncomplicated sex with a woman his own age (Patricia Clarkson) and this seems to be an ideal arrangement for them both. His relationship with his son is fractured and there are one or two understated and impressive scenes between the two. The most affecting relationship is his friendship with George (Dennis Hopper) which is intimate, deep and wry. Look out for a cameo from Debbie Harry.

The film explores intimacy and grief, is generally slow, and disappoints with a cheesy ending about serious illness, which even the young can’t always escape. Brave of Cruz to get her breasts out for the general public to ogle but not necessary to advance the story.

MAN ON WIRE. Dir James Marsh. 2008

2008-10-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

Enthralling documentary about young Frenchman Philippe Petit, whose breathtaking audacity gets him arrested for the ‘artistic crime of the century.’

Man on Wire has a strong theme of destiny throughout. Magician and unicyclist, the teenage Philippe sees a magazine article about the building of the twin towers of the World Trace Center in New York. At that moment his life’s purpose is clear. Everything he does is focused upon this one aim: to wire walk between the two buildings, half a mile above ground level.

As bold and daring as a bank raid, the team manages to get onto the top floor of the Twin Towers, ready for the attempt. Film maker James Marsh uses archive footage, photographs, interviews, recreations and graphics to conjure up a dizzying, exhilarating film.

Refreshingly dismissive of rules, Philippe has no time or patience for limits and restrictions. Driven by his passion and conviction, he lives for freedom from everything - convention and particularly fear.

Reliant on them for the fixing of the cables, his girlfriend and his friends are caught up in his dream, supporting and encouraging him, anchoring him. The spectator too, is captivated by the magical atmosphere of his conviction. His friends are anxious for his safety and his girlfriend fears his obsession is making him close to demonic but his certainty never wavers.

Elated, excited, not manic, but vibrant and compelling, Philippe is spellbinding. This joyous, at times hilarious, film is a celebration of exceptional youthful confidence and nerve. Thrilling, and ultimately moving, Man on Wire shows Philippe is a man living life to the utmost, on the edge of death and feeling truly alive.

Keira Knightley Savaged

2008-09-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

Ah, the bucolic life. I walked through the woodland today to find feathers strewn along the path and a pigeon wing, bent, with red shredded flesh still attached. Red in tooth and claw, this sight of nature in the raw turns my stomach so I pick it up between two sticks and fling it into the undergrowth. I hope that its attacker was merciful, that the killer blow was decisive, and that it made good eating.

Keira Knightley’s savaging by critics, public and press is less kind. In this country Tall Poppy Syndrome is endemic. There is puzzling resentment and jealousy of success unless we look at how that success is earned.

Worker bees on low incomes feel used, underpaid and underappreciated. It’s no surprise that such people are angered when they see huge salaries and bonuses being paid without clear justification.

KK has said, ‘I can learn, I can do this, or at least give me the right director and I’ll give it my best shot. I am trying to become a good actress, really I am.’ This is a nice sentiment. It’s laudable to want to learn and improve. However, it is somewhat naïve of her to think her critics will accept this apprenticeship to the craft whist commanding such fees. Big budget films are not a testing ground for talent.

Every year hundreds, maybe thousands, of girls graduate from intensive acting training the length and breadth of the country. Many of them will be beautiful and talented. Many will get agents, many won’t and most of them won’t get acting work at all.

They will have spent these three years learning their craft, with rigorous discipline, painful exposure to criticism, exploring emotional responses, crossing boundaries which would mortify the rest of us, and doing quite a bit of psychological mining, not to mention the physical work and bodily intimacy required of any actor today.

For these girls, and the thousands who have gone before them, the dedication and stamina required to complete the training and to excel is extreme. Yet, the rewards are scanty unless you have family connections and can bypass the demoralising audition circuit.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, actresses will slog away researching roles and character, directors, their past work and their varying approaches. They will attend numerous auditions with other hopefuls and still be rejected with no reason given.

The consumerist nature of the film world makes it necessary to book a ‘face’ and a ‘name’ to attract punters which detracts from the art of film making and from the story when surely the story is the central element. I mean by this that good casting is the key to a great film experience. Casting a known face, however lovely, has historically drawn audiences who want to see the latest Bette Davis or whoever, regardless of plot but I believe that today’s audiences are more sophisticated.

So, casting directors, it’s time you gave someone else a chance, many others a chance. Maybe you’ve all got supermarket syndrome where, with so much on offer you simply can’t choose. You pick up the same brand you bought last time. We’ve had runs of Meryl Streep in everything for a few years, Kate Winslet ditto, Gwyneth Paltrow, Nicole Kidman. They’re great, but let’s see variety and casting for character - not for box office familiarity.

Implying a sensitive temperament, Joe Wright says of Keira Knightley, ‘She just needs a bit of care and attention and she can light up the screen.’ Quite right. Don’t all workers need care and attention, and good wages too?

It would be tragic to see KK broken on the wheel of fortune when she’s learning to fly but, fragile as she may be, she surely understands that only with a solid background in training and auditions will she earn the respect of her peers and her critics.

THE VISITOR. Dir Thomas McCarthy. 2007

2008-08-23T03:03:00.000-07:00

Widowed Walter is a dry old stick. He returns to his long empty New York apartment and finds it occupied by an immigrant couple. Afraid of being deported, they leave, but Walter takes pity on them and invites them to stay.

Young, handsome Syrian, Tarek and his energetic Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab, offer a contrast to the academic, lapsed writer whose life has ground to a halt. Zainab barely tolerates almost lifeless Walter but Tarek is kind, encourages Walter to play the drum and their friendship develops.

When Tarek is arrested and detained, Walter’s reawakened affections motivate him to help the couple. Tarek’s mother arrives and Walter’s desiccated heart warms even more. Attractive, educated, cultured immigrants engage all Walter’s sympathies but these attributes cut no ice with official policy.

Faced with the cold, impenetrable US immigration system, Walter’s passion fails to save his new friend, but he uses his love of music to keep alive Tarek’s memory, and as an outlet for his rage and frustration. Interesting, realistic and quite depressing.

PRICELESS. Dir Pierre Salvadori. 2007

2008-08-20T07:59:00.000-07:00

Refreshing and funny, Audrey Tautou plays Irène, a scheming gold digger, who mistakes a poor waiter for a wealthy businessman. Passive, slightly depressed Jean (Gad Elmaleh) plays along, false prince to her false darling.

When he is exposed as a fraud, Irène reveals her true colours. No darling but a shrewd materialistic manipulator, she bleeds Jean dry, dumps him and sets off in search of a new sugar daddy.

Unable to shake off jobless, homeless and lovelorn Jean, the pair become allies and Irène coaches Jean in his new role as gigolo to a rich woman. Each has something to teach the other. In this world of grand hotels, chic boutiques and luxury, their collusion brings them closer.

Set in the sunny, glamorous South of France, this charming romantic comedy takes a wry look at the vain and superficial, and Irène and Jean’s attempts to survive amongst the rich and idle.

Deadly Game by David Foley. UK premiere tour.

2008-07-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

On a rainy night in Truro the audience file in to a dimly lit auditorium. The curtains open onto a bright, very smart set – a stylish Manhattan apartment, boldly coloured in maroon and orange with a chrome and glass galley kitchen to one side.

A young man enters from what must be the bedroom, wearing only a bath towel, and the row of middle-aged ladies behind me snigger and giggle, shoving each other and mumbling their approval.

He moves around the apartment with confident ease, as though this is his place but, when a woman comes out of the bedroom in a robe, their exchange is perplexing.

Not a couple at all, Camille (Karen Drury), a wealthy and successful jewellery designer, has brought this young man home from a party, and admits to a weakness for waiters with charm. She tries to pay him off but he won’t take the money and he won’t leave. His earlier confidence is replaced by what seems to be offended sensitivity, but soon becomes smug arrogance as he sits back in her armchair and refuses to move.

Strong, clever Camille will not allow herself to be outwitted by a scheming, ambitious waiter. He gets dressed and the ladies behind me are delighted by a glimpse of his naked backside as he drops the towel from underneath a shirt and tuxedo. We are denied a full revelation for now.

Camille calls her security guard, Ted (Steven Pinder) but getting rid of Billy (Kevin Pallister) isn’t so easy. There are attacks and counter-attacks, feints and dodges. Ted is as defeated as Camille is determined, but she seems to have met her match in Billy. The verbal sparring between the two seems at first to be in her favour - it’s her apartment; she’s wealthy and well-known and he’s an unscrupulous gigolo. Or is he? It’s not clear what he wants from her. He’s a game player and each seeks to outmanoeuvre the other.

Billy does have revelations for Camille, taking her back to the secrets of her past, manipulating her, toying with her, certain of his success. There are moments that are sometimes touching, sometimes macabre. The dialogue is always intelligent, often witty, and David Foley’s well-crafted script and intricate and clever plot has plenty of surprises.

Pinder is excellent as down-on-his-luck Ted, sometimes tough, sometimes desperate. Pallister plays Billy as cocksure and there are one or two missed opportunities where he could be more sinister. Drury over-projects but, as Camille, she maintains audience sympathy, is always likeable and rarely vulnerable.

This play fully engages our attention throughout. It is suspenseful, ironic and impressive watching the power shift from one character to another and it’s never clear which way it’s going to go.

CLOSING THE RING. Dir Richard Attenborough. 2007

2008-07-13T13:47:00.000-07:00

A film about promises and secrets, this love story begins in1941 in Branagan, Michigan, takes us to Belfast during World War II, and during the ‘troubles’ in 1991, and completes the circle back in the US. Attenborough’s direction allows the audience to be active throughout, working out what is happening, calculating back to what must have happened earlier, and putting pieces of the puzzle together.

Three friends all love Ethel Ann (Mischa Barton) although why they all love her is not clear. She’s very lovely to look at, but the script doesn’t give clues as to what makes her so exceptional that they love her for as long as they live. Her desirability is central to the story; the audience needs to feel as passionate about Ethel Ann as do Teddy, Jack and Chuck.

Ethel-Anne chooses Teddy (Stephen Amell) and the two secretly marry because Teddy is believed to be not good enough for Ethel Ann. Say what? Teddy is handsome, polite, well-spoken, hard-working and decent. He’s building her a huge house on his own land with his bare hands; how much more proof do we need of his righteousness? Shortly after the wedding the three friends go off to war in Europe but, before they leave, Teddy selects Chuck to ‘look after’ Ethel Ann if he should die. Horribly, he does, and Chuck returns to fulfill his promise.

Fast forward to 1991 and the mature Ethel Ann is played by Shirley MacLaine who conveys a rather brittle sophistication and cynicism alongside a private, yet apparent, emotional depth. She is remote from, and uncommunicative and unpleasant towards her daughter, Marie (Neve Campbell). Marie becomes increasingly frantic at not getting answers and turns to Jack (Christopher Plummer) for help, but no-one will tell her the truth. Ethel Ann’s buried pain needs to be excavated and it takes a stranger on the other side of the world to expose the truth.

On Black Mountain Michael (Pete Postlethwaite) spends his days digging for relics of the plane crash which he witnessed fifty years earlier. He’s joined by Jimmy (Martin McCann), a lively and enthusiastic lad who lives with his grandmother (Brenda Fricker). These are solid, believable characters and scenes set in Northern Ireland are particularly enjoyable with cracking dialogue, humour and fine performances throughout. Sinister IRA figures provide acute tension and dark realism.

Ebullient and somewhat naïve Jimmy makes a nice contrast with world-weary Ethel Ann and troubled Michael. Not yet wounded, all his emotions out in the open, he is the catalyst who releases Michael from his lifelong quest, and Ethel Ann from her locked-in grief so that healing can begin and reconciliation is made possible.

Apart from the unlikely Barton-MacLaine transition and expecting an audience to believe that gorgeous, gentlemanly Teddy is not perfect marriage material, this is a tender, moving film.

IN BRUGES. Dir Martin McDonagh. 2007

2008-06-14T13:29:00.000-07:00

When a film opens with a torrent of f***ing you might suspect a lack of imagination in the scriptwriting. The unseen foul mouthed Londoner is played by Ralph Fiennes as Harry, paymaster or gang boss. He’s sent Ken (admirably played by Brendan Gleeson) and Ray (Colin Farrell) to Bruges after a botched assassination, so they can hide out and await his instructions. The two are supposedly hit men but lack underlying menace so this may be a light hearted homage to ‘Pulp Fiction.’

Ken patiently tolerates Ray’s nervousness and the two spend time sightseeing. Nothing happens for a time although Ray does meet a girl working on a film set but, once he’s asked her out, she doesn’t work on it anymore which is puzzling. The earlier botched assassination also makes no sense as a small boy would run away or hide if he heard gunshots.

Common sense and continuity flaws aside, there are references to ‘Don’t Look Now’ in the way Bruges is made to look sinister at times around the canals and mediaeval architecture. There’s also a midget.

Contrasted with Gleeson’s dignified calm, Farrell grimaces, twitches and fusses, unable to form a natural facial expression for much of the story.

Lacks pace, tension and meaning although the ending is a redemption or sacrifice of sorts, honour among thieves/killers sort of thing. Funny in places.

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY. Dir Mike Leigh. 2008

2008-05-18T13:18:00.000-07:00

Simple, retarded asthmatic gasps and giggles her way through this nonsensical film from Mike Leigh.

30 year old Poppy’s arrested development is masked by her carer who provides meals and stability. This form of care in the community works well so that Poppy is able to extend her adolescence in this flat-sharing arrangement by climbing into bed with her carer and exhibiting teenage tactile behaviour. Her flatmate is tolerant, even when getting no answers as to where Poppy has been and whether or not she’s ok.

To Poppy’s credit she holds down a job. Inconceivably a primary school teacher, she is left in a position of responsibility with young children for long periods without supervision. However, classroom activities are restricted to making masks out of brown paper bags in case anyone thought primary school teaching involved real work.

Leigh raises the possibility of serious subject matter when a boy begins to bully others. Without parental involvement, a Social Worker (Samuel Roukin) is called in to assist. This is a miracle in itself, unprofessional and unrealistic. A second miracle is that he hits on girlish Poppy. Quite a catch, he is tall, articulate and gentle and not put off by Poppy’s inane prattle as she burbles at him like an infant, making faces and squirming.

Randomly inserted scenes bear no relation to each other; a baffling expositional ‘state of the world today’ scene in a bar and Poppy’s unexplained encounter with a homeless madman late at night where no sensible woman would venture. He is more crazed than she is but, when he grabs angrily at her, she is unperturbed.

Deciding to take driving lessons, she is also unperturbed by the disturbing behaviour of her driving instructor (Eddie Marsan), a man clinging to self-control, whose barely contained stress has him at the point of ignition. She fails to detect any danger in him and pushes him over his limit.

Fine acting from Marsan although disturbing and painful to watch. When he does lose control, Poppy speaks to him as though he is an angry little boy rather than a sinister obsessive. His apoplectic tirade against Poppy briefly stems the flow of her verbal dysentery. After his explosive outburst, detailing her maddening transgressions, she sits on the naughty step for a whole minute, thinks about what she’s done, then reverts to the child-like babbling of Thames estuary village idiot.

Unable to understand and react appropriately to the feelings of others and to different situations, Poppy’s imbecilic drivel is provoking and insensitive. Her specific mental disorder is not clarified but, far from creating sympathy, any audience member able to remain in their seat beyond the first ten minutes will want to kill her.

The Man Who Had All The Luck. A Fable by Arthur Miller. Dir Sean Holmes. Donmar on tour, April 2008

2008-04-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

Written in 1940, Miller’s play reached Broadway in 1944, closed after four performances, and knocked his career sideways. It must have been way before its time, because this play about a young man having it all while those around him fail and flounder is superb. Staged in 1944, post-depression, perhaps it was too realistic. Seeing the play today, it is about fate, acceptance, and philosophy, and sits comfortably with our modern understanding of psychological self-doubt and anxiety.

Western neuroses recur about why some of us have wealth and success and some have nothing, locally and globally. Miller’s play questions how much control we have over our own destinies, and what effect we have when we try to force events. From a go-with-the-flow attitude to make-it-happen determination, The Man Who Had All The Luck suggests a combination of the two.

David Beeves is a cheerful, self-taught motor mechanic with a small repair shop in Michigan. In love with his childhood sweetheart, all he wants is to marry Hester … but the only obstacle to his happiness is her father. In a key scene, Hester’s father forbids David from seeing her again, and tells David he is a ‘lost soul,’ seeming to damn him. The curse is David’s sense of being unworthy.

David gets his heart’s desire. Throughout the play he questions his right to happiness; is he good enough for Hester; is he a good enough mechanic? In short, does he deserve his happiness? Blessed with good fortune, it almost seems as though his luck has a supernatural quality to it. When a highly skilled visitor appears in his repair shop at four in the morning and repairs a complicated problem it feels as though an angel has come.

David becomes increasingly twitchy and nervous about his successes, the more so as the people around him suffer. His guilt and shame threaten to consume him, to destroy his sanity and his marriage. Convinced that all his luck will have to be paid for, he cannot enjoy the pleasures life has given him and he expects catastrophe to strike.

His lack of self-awareness and self-knowledge make him seem an uncomplicated fellow but David is warm-hearted, sensible and hard-working. He thinks things through, doesn’t take risks, is honest and fair. It takes a near calamity for him to understand that these qualities are enough for him to have earned his good life. He finally understands that he is worthy of all he has.

Today is a good time to have revived this play about contentment. The Donmar Warehouse have put on a terrific production with a great set, fabulous lighting, a large and excellent cast, and created a riveting show. Hester could tone down just a bit, so not to appear too hysterical - this distracts from David’s sinister descent into madness which is harrowing enough. Otherwise, highly recommended for fine acting and great quality from start to finish.

THE DARJEELING LTD. Dir Wes Anderson. 2007

2008-04-21T05:58:00.000-07:00

We are treated to a bizarre short film set in a hotel room in Paris with Jack’s girlfriend (Natalie Portman) before the main feature. As a result, Jack (Jason Schwartzman) holds attention in the main feature because we have some idea about his sense of loss. Perhaps if all three brothers had been given a short of their own we could have understood them better.

The film blurb gives us the clue that three brothers haven’t spoken for a year, since their father’s death. Without reading that first, the film doesn’t show us this, or tell us why. What we see is a meeting of the brothers on a train in India, for the purpose of a spiritual quest orchestrated by brother Francis (Owen Wilson) heavily bandaged after a bad car accident. Peter and Jack humour him. Again, what’s the backstory?

There are clues that their mother wasn’t around much for them and won’t want to see them, but no clues about their relationship with their father, or whether their low-level sibling rivalry has strong foundation. Peter (Adrien Brody) is nervous about becoming a father himself but it’s not clear why. Without any clues as to his relationship with his own father we can only guess.

Heavy on symbolism, centring on death and mourning, Wes Anderson serves up a Western style of grieving – Francis’s control-freakish organized spiritual quest across India. This is contrasted against an Eastern treatment of death where the grief stricken Indian father, angry at first, then tender, holds and washes his son, repeatedly touches and bathes the body, and all the village are involved in the funeral. This juxtaposition with the isolation experienced following loss in the West is interesting. The brothers must learn to let things go and they fling away all their baggage to show they have managed it.

Minimal on dialogue and illumination, there are many gaps in the narrative. Rita (Amara Karan), the hostess on the train, is intriguing but why is she crying, and why doesn’t she get some decent lines? There is some visual humour, the general oddness of the brothers and their situation has a quirky appeal, and we get a good look at India. However, momentum slows right up about half way through and the movie drags itself into the buffers for the end. As with many journeys, leaves you wondering just why you went.

THE OTHER BOLEYN GIRL. Dir Justin Chadwick. 2008

2008-03-25T15:03:00.000-07:00

Fabulous cinematography creates a moving painting; colours and images stay in the mind long after the film has ended. Intense darkness, golden lighting and lustrous colour bring the Old Masters to life. Costume designer Sandy Powell used old works of art for research, so costuming is lavish and rich while the camera lingers on fabric, skin and hair to produce an acutely sensory experience.

Scarlett Johanssen plays the loyal and affectionate younger sister, Mary, used as a honey trap to charm the king and gain power for her family. Reluctant at first, she seems cast as unwilling whore but this fictional representation portrays Henry VIII and Mary Boleyn as tender lovers.

Henry (Eric Bana) is shown to be capricious and easily bewitched by Anne although her power appears fleeting. Natalie Portman plays the scheming Anne, maturing from cocky, arch young girl to challenging temptress, before she loses her hold over him, and her descent into terrified desperation is effective and gripping.

History has taught that Henry was under great pressure from his Council to provide England with a male heir, making him something of a stud bull, which is as disgusting as his usage of the poor cows he is under duress to impregnate. It may be romantically nostalgic to suggest he and Mary had true love and trust when his record as a fickle, wife murdering syphilitic ruin is plain. Had he genuinely sired a bastard son, born of Mary, it would have fulfilled his obligation to England and allowed him to return to his sport and hunting but, historically, did he really? Or was Mary's son fathered by some other court member?

The Other Boleyn Girl focuses on the period in Henry’s life when he was physically attractive to women, before he divided the country and massacred thousands of monks, and it is an exquisitely beautiful film. Screenwriter Peter Morgan’s adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s novel revitalizes a dramatic period in English history, shows the opulence, ambition and deceptions of Court life, and this film is as sumptuous as the velvets, fur and jewels which adorn the cast.

IN THE VALLEY OF ELAH. Dir Paul Haggis. 2007

2008-03-24T03:30:00.000-07:00

Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank, a retired military policeman, father to two soldiers. Mike, the youngest, goes missing shortly after his return to base from Iraq, and Hank sets out to find him.

He comes up against Charlize Theron playing a desensitized female detective working amongst misogynistic officers. Hardened to human suffering, this woman in a man’s world is impatient with Hank when he asks for her help. However, the nature of the murder intrigues and touches her, and they form an uneasy alliance in the search for Mike’s killers.

Theron is convincing as the isolated single mother; fallible, human but also determined. Lee Jones is on good form as the disciplined, methodical military man, who loses control just once, his emotions only for him to know. Susan Sarandon, as the bereaved mother, conveys the loneliness of grief and deep, internalized suffering.

Handled with restraint throughout - dialogue, performances and cinematography - writer and director Paul Haggis has created a realistic drama about a father’s quest for his son and the truth. Elah shows the precarious balance struck between the importance of self control and repressing human emotions. Coming after many stories about the effect of the Vietnam War and drug abuse on America’s soldiers, Elah still manages to surprise.

Elephant

2008-03-10T02:29:00.000-07:00

Dodgy Clutch Theatre Co in assoc with The Market Theatre, Johannesburg
UK Tour, March - April 2008

A bewitching production providing a great evening’s entertainment, with story, dance, music and song. The elephants of the title are stunningly beautiful, enormous puppets that are both awe inspiring and enchanting.

Dancers and singers from Johannesburg and the UK combine to perform Elephant, a cautionary tale about forgiveness and humanity. This is Chief Zanenvula’s story: refused entry to heaven, he has to look back over his life to discover his mistakes.

Accompanied by a manipulative new ‘friend,’ who has something of Alexei Sayle about him, the Chief revisits key scenes in his childhood, adolescence and maturity. He gradually understands how he has offended the spirit of Africa and learns how to redeem himself.

This an energetic production: the dancing is varied, athletic and graceful; songs are soulful and lively, the text touching and comic. Staging and lighting recreates the warmth and vibrancy of Africa, and the combination of the whole alternates between touching and hilarious, whilst transfixing throughout. Unmissable.

THE SAVAGES. Dir Tamara Jenkins. 2007

2008-03-03T07:43:00.000-08:00

Pitch perfect. Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman play a brother and sister (Wendy and Jon) with some distance between them. Both writers, he is a college professor specializing in Brecht, she is an aspiring playwright. Both are uneasy about their childhood and have put it behind them, until a crisis recalls them to their estranged father. They have to care for him when he had never cared much for them.

Seen from Wendy's viewpoint, she reacts emotionally, tries to do the right thing and feels guilty, while Jon takes a practical line, refusing to make a fuss about any of it, which she misinterprets as a callous attitude. It reveals an interesting difference in approaches to the elderly, and his calm, reasoned approach seems the more effective. When Wendy agonizes about how to ask their father what they should do in the event of his unconsciousness or 'possible' death, their father shouts 'Pull the plug! Bury me!' as though they are idiots.

Now and again, brother and sister regress into competitive bickering which is funny and excruciating at the same time and, for a moment, the viewpoint switches into that of their father, giving a sense of his desire to escape from them. From the dessicated and claustrophobic retirement village 'Sun City' to the messy apartments and slightly messy lives of the siblings, the whole film is excellent, realistic and funny.

The Notebook of Trigorin. Dir Ben Crocker. Northcott Theatre, 28th Feb 2008.

2008-02-28T02:50:00.000-08:00

The Northcott Theatre Company perform the UK premiere of Tennessee Williams’ 'The Notebook of Trigorin,' a free adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 'The Seagull' to an almost exclusively white and grey haired audience. Why does Chekhov not appeal to the under 55s, or is it that tragedy appeals only to the worldly wise?

Chekhov’s play about human fragility and the impossibility of people relating to each other in an equal and meaningful way is a depressing premise. However, despite the gloomy subject matter there are touches of intentional comedy.

Mme Arkadina, a successful dramatic actress, clings to her youth and glory, and fears the decline of her powers. She is unable to recognize – or she resists – the talents of her son, Constantine; he has youth, vigour and a passion for writing ... and the whole of life ahead of him. He merely reminds her of her age. Liz Crowther plays a sprightly Arkadina although the choreography has her skipping around the stage at times which is incongruous in its girlishness. This lightness does, however, provide a counterbalance to the almost overwhelming intensity of her son, Constantine (Philip Cumbus).

Each character is tragic and unfulfilled. Constantine loves stage-struck Nina (Rhiann Steele) but she adores the successful writer, Trigorin. Trigorin (James Wallace) loves no-one and, here, the writer is portrayed as the heartless villain of the piece who feels little for any character but merely makes notes which he can work up into stories. He has occasional homosexual encounters, toys with Nina’s affection and has a co-dependant relationship with the older woman, Arkadina, despising her yet needing her hold upon him.

Beyond the main characters, Sorin (David Peart), on whose estate the drama is played out, is Arkadina’s older brother. Stuck in the country, he longs for city life and stimulation but remains frustrated and frail in the countryside. Masha is in love with Constantine – although it is unclear why she is attracted to such a dark character – but she settles for an inferior husband, Medvedenko (Charlie Walker-Wise), so it’s unrequited love all round.

Casting against type can be stimulating to a production but, as this one conforms to the costume and furniture of the period, casting a mixed race actress with glorious curly black hair gets in the way of credibility when playing the daughter of a Russian landowner, however delightfully pretty. As this is a Tennessee Williams adaptation it would have been fun to steep the drama in Southern oppressive heat and languor and, getting the actors to perform using deep South accents would have added depth. Performed in standard English, it lacks Russian mystery whilst retaining Chekhovian gloom.

Costuming is perfect and Kit Surrey has designed an enchanting set made of gauzy painted screens which allow changing light to alter mood from moonlight to daytime. Birdsong and soft light creates lakeside serenity in direct contrast to the dissatisfaction of the characters. Most unpleasant is the callous Doctor Dorn (Vincent Brimble) who is brutally honest, cares nothing for anyone and seeks casual liaisons, but who could be the only character satisfied with his life choices.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. Dir Joel Cohen & Ethan Coen. 2007

2008-02-27T16:33:00.000-08:00

Unrelenting, gratuitous violence in the mould of spaghetti Westerns, this film provides superb tension throughout, with touches of dark humour. Largely silent, with close focus on minutiae, it’s an acute visual experience but also a philosophical treatise on the meaning of life, or lack of it, and the role of chance.

Western lovers will enjoy the abandoned and wrecked pick ups in a circle with corpses strewn about, not a rifle deal gone wrong or a wagon train ambushed by pesky red Indians, but a Mexican drug deal. The lone figure who comes upon this scene is not cheroot smoking Eastwood but a capable, resourceful and monosyllabic ex-Vietnam veteran who keeps one step ahead of his pursuer, the psychopathic assassin who wants to recover the cash.

The Coen brothers drive the narrative along, providing the expected markers of stalking movies: laconic, indestructible assassin Chigurh (Javier Bardem) and his fearless and confident prey, Llewellyn (Josh Brolin), working towards the anticipated final shootout. But, life’s unpredictable.

This is possibly Tommy Lee Jones’ finest performance as Sheriff Bell, the ageing cop who’s seen it all. At the end of a long life, things happen, people die. Does he have to deliver the coup de grace before he retires, or will he, like the rest of us, have to be content with unfinished business and puzzles unsolved? Superbly crafted, finely acted with spot on cinematography, but may leave you dissatisfied.

CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR. Dir Mike Nichols. 2007

2008-02-27T16:27:00.000-08:00

Covert assistance doesn't get much PR so this seems to be an American propaganda film demonstrating how the US funded the defeat of Russian troops in Afghanistan during the eighties, whilst making the point that after sales service is non-existent at US inc.

Congressman Charlie Wilson is persuaded to visit the refugee camps in Pakistan and is converted to the cause of the Afghan people fleeing occupation. More than simply a tale about Wilson’s realization that civilians suffer in wartime, this could have the subtitle, ‘Americans love guns.’ Wilson manages to persuade various committees to supply money which provides anti-helicopter weaponry and the chaps get very excited about these big tools. He is, however, unable to persuade them to provide any cash for schools or hospitals once those Ruskies are whupped. Iraq war anyone? West Wing scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin delivers a rapid fire script which, with mumbling, is sometimes hard to follow but it’s nicely acted. Hanks is believable, as is Roberts - apart from the distracting blonde wigs, and Philip Seymour Hoffman has fun as coarse but quick-thinking Gust.

THE KITE RUNNER. Dir Marc Forster. 2007

2008-02-02T21:28:00.000-08:00

Shame runs right through this redemption story, the filmed adaptation of the bestselling novel by Khaled Hosseini. The central character, pre-pubescent, aspiring writer Amir, is not an easy boy to like, and he disappoints his father, (an apparently shining example of the chivalric), because he is not a manly boy. Amir’s doggedly loyal young friend and servant, however, is a moral barometer, a knight in the making, saintly and ballsy by turns.

The opening credits use fabulous graphics and atmospheric music to create a sense of the eastern exotic and conjure up childhood tales from 1001 Arabian nights – Amir is a storyteller after all – but the film is strongly realist.

The Russians invade Afghanistan, Amir escapes to America with his father, and they must adapt from their ancient code of caste rules and family honour to consumer culture. Twenty years later, he returns to war torn Kabul, in the grip of the Taliban, his time of revelations.

Wholly masculine, apart from cameos of two Iranian women (Amir’s open, westernized young wife resettled in the US and a brutally persecuted, burkha covered woman), the film bears witness to male rape: of country and culture. It is about growing up, destruction of innocence, and theft. A key speech from Amir’s father focuses on theft as the root of all crimes, of possessions, liberty or life.

Amir keeps his own secrets and his rite of passage into adulthood is personal. Although the usual childhood demons are present, in the form of neighbourhood bullies and fractured communication with his father, Amir’s story is an allegorical one about devotion, dignity, and the need to fight for oneself, and for others. This is a sensitive and absorbing film about friendship, responsibilities and the importance of honour.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. Dir Andrew Dominik. 2007

2008-01-20T12:00:00.000-08:00

Immeasurable gloomy, the length of the title and the running time of 2 hrs 39 mins give pretty strong indications - it’s too long and too slow. However easy on the eye Brad Pitt may be, close ups of his face and that of Casey Affleck as Ford fail to illuminate a tedious and near incomprehensible movie. Strong on atmosphere and weak on story, interminable shots of snow, winter landscape and bleak interiors are overlaid with voiceover historical narrative which make the heart sink. We could go and read this stuff for ourselves.

What could have been an interesting psychological profiling of the lead characters is instead dreary. Contradictory behaviour gives clues to James’ psychotic state - he talks about suicide and feeling depressed, is coldly violent then almost maniacal. There are also demonstrations that he is a ruthless killer - but he’s quite nice really because he plays with his children and is affectionate towards his wife. Following the savage beating of a teenage boy he leans against his saddle and cries, at which point I’d have happily shot him myself, and it’s not clear whether we are meant to sympathize with him or understand him. His psychological torment seems to lift as Spring approaches and the passing of the winter is a reminder that we have only spent a few months with these characters but it feels like years.

As a biographical drama, Jesse James remains enigmatic and unreal. A mythical character, about whom some things are known, while much is legendary and false, this film has nothing to add. Pitt deploys occasional charm and a roguish smile but this is a loathsome role for him to play - James is repellent. Although Ford’s obsession with James is creepy, and his small, broken and wheedling voice drives me almost crazy, his treatment as a runt, and the butt of all jokes makes him pitiful. He is overlooked, underestimated and resentful but that doesn’t make him any more likeable. Killing Jesse James is his one chance to be effective.

The highlight of the film is the intensely atmospheric train robbery, night scene camerawork and lighting. Despite the brevity of his appearance and dialogue, Sam Shepard (as brother Frank James) provides dignity and gravitas, and the promiscuous Dick Liddil brings the only warmth to a comfortless few hours.

Editing could tighten things up but, without audience identification, a good story, visual delights or a compelling soundtrack, there’s not much to keep you in your seat.

ONCE. Dir John Carney. 2006

2007-12-08T03:16:00.000-08:00

The Frames’ front man Glen Hansard plays a wounded busker singing songs of heartache and heartbreak on the streets of Dublin. He is spotted by a young Czech immigrant spots who loves his songs although they are pretty maudlin.

She is the driving force that shakes him out of his inertia, prompts him to pick up the pieces and follow his dream, and it’s interesting that she is making such a success of her life in a new country whilst he is floundering in his own. Without her he'd still be fixing vacuum cleaners in a back street shop. Perhaps fresh starts are a Jolly Good Thing.

They recognize each other as a pair of love casualties and this film is a touching study of two people meeting at a vulnerable time in their lives and making a connection. It shows the transitory nature of very deep affection without providing the obvious outcome, avoiding the cliche of boy meets girl.Despite the hand held camerawork being a bit jerky at times, intentionally arty but disconcerting, and the poor sound quality, this is sweet, tender, and subtle.

Newton Faulkner. Hall for Cornwall, Truro. 4th Dec 2007.

2007-12-05T02:24:00.000-08:00

Newton Faulkner’s returned to Truro after visiting Europe this autumn. He’s a sell out in most British venues and his last date is back in Cornwall where, only in March, he was the support for James Morrison.

Since the success of his single Dream Catch Me with its summer sound that gets right in your head and stays there, he’s also getting plenty of airtime for his new single, Teardrop. Relaxed and easy on stage, Faulkner chats between numbers, his long dreads swinging in front of his face. He goes into a soft reggae song, just off the beat, for ‘People Should Smile More’ and the warm crowd of 1700 go crazy for him, cheering, waving and calling out, ‘I Love You.’

Strumming and banging, using his guitar as percussion, he’s backed up by bongos and a bassist, and moves from ballad to funk. He’s got such a great voice it seems he can’t make an ugly sound, then he shifts into a stomping rhythm for ‘UFO.’ Whatever he does the crowd love it, and he’s having fun. He raises a finger - they cheer, his other hand - they are delighted. He stands still and smiles - they’re ecstatic.

He gets them singing along to the mellow ‘All I Got,’ and has them singing through the whole set. He says between numbers that when he started out two and a half years ago he had to think what to say while he tuned and retuned his guitar, but these days he’s handed the guitar all set up. He shakes his head and seems surprised at his success. Grinning and happy to be here, he's confident, playful, messing around and getting a jangling, funky sound from his guitar.

His new single Teardrop was released just yesterday. He says he first played it here and it was the greatest moment of his life. The solid drum backing and intense harmonies give this song real depth, and it shows his voice at its best: passionate with terrific control, he slips easily from smoothly melodic to soulful and husky.

From that fine song he chuckles and tells us an anecdote about a random encounter with an evil hot girl on a train and it’s clear he doesn’t take himself and maybe anyone else that seriously. It’s a varied set; he enjoys playing around with sound, and he has an enviable rapport with his audience that makes him seem like the popular guy in the University common room, always cheerful and acting a bit of a clown.

After the light acoustic ‘Feels Like Home,’ he passes on a ‘beautiful message’ from a guy in the audience: a marriage proposal and a great chorus of Yes! - the perfect moment to give us the tender Dream Catch Me. He stands alone on the stage for what feels like a classic song. The audience are still singing with him, sharing this couple’s romantic moment.

It’s a terrific atmosphere and he keeps it going with a few different pieces for his encore, ending, rather oddly with Bohemian Rhapsody, quite a feat for one man and an acoustic guitar. Although this cover is a curious choice to follow a highly individualistic set, it’s a perfect demonstration of his delight in experimenting, and his refreshingly light hearted approach. Apart from all the mucking about though, there were bits of classical guitar playing thrown in here and there which suggest he’s got a lot more styles up his sleeve to play around with.

He’s off to win over America and Canada in January. The only way is up.

Sherlock Holmes… the last act! Dir. Gareth Armstrong. 1st Dec 2007, Truro.

2007-12-01T15:05:00.000-08:00

Writer David Stuart Davies has created a superb one man show, and the script is spot on, combining humour and pathos with drama and keeping the tension throughout.

Sherlock Holmes returns to Baker Street after the funeral of his old friend, Watson and, from the moment he appears on stage Roger Llewellyn is riveting. It is impossible to tear your eyes from him as he talks to Watson, or to the memory of him, recalling their first meeting, reminding him of conversations past, and recreating the cases and the stories they worked on together. He demonstrates a tender and regretful affection for Watson which is often poignant, but also amusing.

Llewellyn’s performance is spellbinding. He plays a whole host of characters, switches accents and posture with bewildering ease, and terrific direction from Gareth Armstrong keeps him moving around the stage in surprisingly physical theatre. He is both fit and graceful. The pace is fine tuned so that moments of high melodrama move seamlessly into touching introspection, and on to camp self-aggrandisement. We are in the presence of a superior intellect; Holmes relishes his powers and thrives on stimulus.

Davies’ script provides a fascinating angle on the literary figure, a character wedded to reason and logic, fixated on the analytical, yet presenting aspects of vulnerability. He rants about the Great War, confesses to his addiction, is lost in reverie as he re-imagines an enchanting young woman and is disgusted by his own brutish father.

The set is minimal, only the few essential, recognizable props for Holmes’s rooms, and clever use of sound effects and lighting come together to create theatre at its most engaging. Davies’ great writing, Armstrong’s flawless direction and Llewellyn’s strong presence offer an astonishing experience.

The Changeling by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. Dir. Steve Unwin. English Touring Theatre. November 2007

2007-11-25T02:31:00.000-08:00

Written in 1621, The Changeling requires a modern audience to cast aside twenty-first century social and sexual politics. A pre-show talk by Nottingham Playhouse Theatre Company’s Steve Unwin explains that, far from being distressed, Beatrice-Joanna would have been honoured to have her husband chosen for her by her father, and that her disobedience would have struck contemporary audiences as deeply shocking.

Days before her wedding to an unwanted suitor, the apparently indulged Beatrice-Joanna instead falls for Alsemero. An awkward situation, further complicated by her father’s devoted servant de Flores, who is obsessed with her. She repels de Flores until she decides to make him useful, asking him to kill her bridegroom and leave her free to marry Alsemero.

It has not occurred to her that she has made a deal with the devil. To her horror, he refuses money but claims her as his reward, switching her from privileged and headstrong young woman to hapless victim.

Not only a Jacobean revenge drama, The Changeling looks at woman’s roles of the time at three levels of society: the aristocrat Beatrice-Joanna, the young, beautiful wife of the lunatic asylum’s director, condemned to virtual imprisonment because she is desirable, and Beatrice-Joanna’s maidservant. The female characters are intelligent and powerful, and all three actresses give strong, impressive performances.

It is hard to understand how the despised de Flores ignites a passion in Beatrice-Joanna, unless this is created by the power he holds over her, and which we would recognize as Stockholm Syndrome. She is impressed by his quick thinking and effectiveness which turns her scorn to admiration. Shockingly avant-garde in its time, The Changeling is a play of extremes; passion, madness and murder, finely recreated and staged four hundred years after it was written, by The English Touring Theatre in a co-production with the Nottingham Playhouse Company.

MICHAEL CLAYTON. Dir. Tony Gilroy. 2007

2007-11-15T00:37:00.000-08:00

Clooney is mesmerizing as smooth, smart fixer for a large corporate law firm in New York. He’s brought in to tidy up the mess when friend Arthur (Tom Wilkinson) appears to have a breakdown whilst working on a lengthy compensation case for an agro-chemical corporation.

The case stinks; small farmers and their families have been poisoned by the company’s carcinogenic weed killer, and Arthur switches sides. He’s up against Karen (Tilda Swinton), ruthless boss of the agrochemical company.

There are no caricatures and no clichés in this cracking, believable, suspense movie. It’s a fine character study of Clayton, who operates alone using an extensive network of legal contacts. Cool and adept on the job, he is distracted and inattentive when he’s with his bright and thoughtful son, and the boy provides a nice counterbalance to Clayton’s worldly effectiveness.

Wilkinson is on superb form as a clever lawyer, suffering from mental health problems and overcome with guilt. The hit men are clinically efficient and, despite the two corporations being morally indefensible, the focus on individuals maintains realism without amping up emotional drama.

Gilroy’s script is spot on: intelligent, suspenseful and compelling, with an open minded, straightforward attitude towards mental illness. Direction is perfectly paced and strong performances are convincing throughout. Definitely one to watch again, could even become a classic, and a stylish follow up to the Bourne trilogy from Tony Gilroy.

THE SINGER. Dir. Xavier Giannoli. 2006

2007-11-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

Desperately slow moving focus on Alain (Depardieu) and Marion (Cecile de France), with the camera lingering particularly lovingly on the latter. Her beautiful eyes are almost spellbinding but that doesn’t make for enough of a story. Alain is a singer and the cheesy material and excruciating lyrics are difficult to sit through. The film quality is grainy which makes it look like a home movie but does add to the seventies, downbeat, dance hall atmosphere.

However, this simple drama about an older, fading, local celebrity, falling for a young, enigmatic woman is touching at times, mortifying at others, and Alain’s dogged pursuit of the obviously reluctant Marion is embarrassing. You just want to tell him to stop it and leave her alone. She is deeply troubled, suffering from a recent relationship break-up, and hardly ready to be wooed and won by an older, overweight man. Alain persists, is rejected, then seemingly toyed with as Marion develops an affection for him.

Both characters are vulnerable and rather tragic; both are likeable and recognisable. The relationship Alain has with his ex-wife is harder to understand. She is now his manager and appears to play the role of his mother whilst resenting his affairs.

Depardieu and de France play their roles with great sensitivity to win our sympathies. Their lives are disappointing but they’re bravely making the best of it, and the film never descends into self-pity. The Singer was nominated for the Golden Palm in Cannes and has become popular in France.

SERAPHIM FALLS/ Dir. David Von Ancken. 2007

2007-11-06T08:20:00.001-08:00

Gripping quarry and pursuit movie for landscape junkies. Quality cinematography and direction keep the tension going throughout the lengthy chase after Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) by Carver (Liam Neeson) and his men. Starting high in snow covered mountains, the relentless hunt continues downriver as Gideon evades his pursuers, determined to survive not only them, but an embedded bullet, freezing, near drowning, starvation and thirst. He comes up with some ingenious but brutal survival techniques. The squeamish may need to look away at times; the camera spares no detail in this visceral and thrilling adventure.

However, when Gideon gets down to a dried up riverbed in an arid landscape, (which looks like seasonal confusion, but is possibly symbolic) the story dries up too. There are some surreal references to Eastwood’s classic ‘The Outlaw Josey Wales’ in the inexplicable appearance of a medicine seller and a wise Indian in the desert which are plain silly. Possible nods to Josey Wales include the motive for revenge and the former relationship between the two men, which are either an homage, or cheeky, hard to tell, although Seraphim Falls lacks the characterization, humour and charm, the relationships and humanity of Josey Wales.

Often the case with films made in the US, the dialogue is a mystery. Usually it’s because of mumbling with face turned away from camera but here, it seems to be the wadding in Brosnan’s cheeks combined with his American accent and breathy growling. But he IS very cold, he’s in pain and probably getting tired and quite cross. Other actors are also near incoherent, so it’s time the US movie industry smartens up its act for worldwide distribution, or uses sub-titles.

Enjoy the scenery and don’t worry about the story and it looks pretty good. Only the last twenty minutes of supposed angel/devil visitation stuff is daft but the first eighty minutes is superb, stylish and memorable.

The Stylistics, Truro, UK, 31st October 2007

2007-10-31T09:31:00.000-07:00

Some of these musicians are massive, I mean American massive. One of them forces his bulk through the coffee shop holding a piece of cake and a drink, and drops his napkin. It is returned to him with the comment, ‘You may want to get a fresh one.’ He doesn’t respond, even with a glance, but collects another and sits down with his co-singers exuding the attitude of a spoilt child. Moments later, when one of the other band members asks what the cake’s like, he says, ‘It’s sum kinda baaaed sheeeit.’ He doesn’t finish it.

Who would have expected black Americans to be so precious but it’s the Health and Safety culture that’s to blame, when a perfectly good piece of cake is simply not good enough and a paper napkin that has touched the floor is a noxious thing.

On stage, the Stylistics exude professionalism and charm. The huge guys are the Style Orchestra; the Stylistics are up front in matching suits, shirts and shoes and look in pretty good shape for a band that’s been together for 39 years. They spin, step and move in perfect synchronicity, running through a set packed with old favourites for over an hour.

Playing to a packed house of dewy eyed oldsters with glowing memories of seventies discos, they’re in crowd pleasing mood. The glitter ball turns above the stage flashing beams of white light around the auditorium and everyone’s on their feet, clapping and dancing. You can just feel the lurve.

BREACH. Dir. Billy Ray. 2007

2007-10-24T02:27:00.000-07:00

Ryan Phillippe plays Eric, a young, bright, FBI employee whose IT skills and quick thinking get him a job spying on Robert Hanssen (jailed for life in 2001 for providing the KGB with military secrets for 15 years.) Ambitious and motivated, Eric takes it on, hoping for fast track promotion to agent.

Hanssen’s certainty that he is smarter than anyone else is what drives him, but Eric’s smart too, and this suspenseful, intelligent film keeps us guessing as to which one will outwit the other. Eric keeps his cool despite his prey becoming his predator when Hanssen (Chris Cooper) monitors him just as closely, turns up at his house, anticipates every move Eric makes, and is aware of every level of FBI surveillance. He’s a hard man to dupe.

Alongside their egos clashing, the story covers the moral dilemmas of both men. Hanssen is a devout Catholic who fantasizes about Catherine Zeta Jones and sells movies of himself having sex with his wife, while young Eric isn’t happy with the way the job is destabilizing his marriage.

The film’s message is stated twice: It’s what you do that counts, not why. It’s a thought provoking premise and does away with a whole raft of excuses. Hanssen was jailed, so obviously he was caught but, in being caught, his brilliance and effectiveness is made public. Like ‘Catch Me If You Can,’ it’s a thought provoking study of a good mind, unrecognized, becoming destructive.

Dialogue is spare and taut, cinematography is clean and sharp, and there are great performances throughout.

TRANSYLVANIA. Dir Tony Gatlif. 2006

2007-10-03T07:54:00.000-07:00

It’s unclear whether this film is supposed to be a romance, a road trip, or a creative documentary, and the result is a bewildering series of unconnected scenes.

A disturbed French girl, Zingarina, arrives in Transylvania with her anxious sister as carer, and an interpreter, and the trio are searching for Zingarina’s absconded lover. She finds him, he rejects her, and she descends into a prolonged schizophrenic episode and, because we know nothing about these characters and have been shown nothing to evoke our interest or sympathy, it’s meaningless and irritating.

Zingarina whirls around in her own misery, messing up a really interesting carnival procession of national costumed musicians and singers when, as a documentary, this could have been fascinating and illuminating. At various times during the film there are tantalising glimpses of local performers but there is little dialogue and no insight into either gypsy or local culture, leaving the impression of a film shot out of a car window – fleeting and unsatisfying. Had Gatlif taken the approach of Wim Wender’s Buena Vista Social Club this could have been a rich experience.

Instead, he tries to work in an implausible relationship between Zingarina and a parasitic itinerant dealer who preys on the poor. The dealer is a Bob Geldof lookalike who becomes marginally likeable and achieves some redemption when he (inexplicably) links up with the crazed Zingarina, sees she is a deluded hysteric, and takes her to be exorcized of her demons. There follows a long scene with her behaving - that is standing still and not thrashing around - amidst exquisitely beautifully male voice toning while a priest reads from his book, but the pair run away without paying and get a curse thrown at them. Pretty ungrateful.

However, she seems okay now and, the pair travel around, living in a car; she holds out the palm of her hand a lot, showing a big eye drawn on it, seems to get aroused by hitting him, then starts wearing red skirts and everyone thinks she is a gypsy. Cutting out the daft relationship from this film would leave some intriguing footage of musicians and singers but it would take real stamina to sit through it for these randomly inserted snippets of local colour.

So many questions are unanswered and continuity is a real problem. Why does Z neurotically cling to her sister and, two minutes later, disappear leaving her a note, and what is wrong with her sister’s legs? What is the meaning of the massive tattoo on Zingarina’s abdomen? How does she goes to sleep in a grey skirt and wake up in a black, flowered one? How come, after living on the road for seven months, her hair remains dyed dark brown without her roots showing, and she still has on dark eyeliner?

The first half of this film is a complete riddle and, struggling to find some logic or meaning to it during the second half, one slim possibility emerges: people keep leaving. Must be about grief and loss then. Ah, only one person comes back. She smiles. The end.

THE HOAX. Dir Lasse Hallström. 2006

2007-09-24T04:55:00.000-07:00

This doesn’t sound like an interesting premise for a film; an unsuccessful writer faking the autobiography of Howard Hughes and getting caught, but it’s gripping, and true.

Clifford Irving’s breathtaking audacity is so outrageous and implausible that you have to keep watching because you can’t believe he’ll pull it off, and he nearly does. Richard Gere plays Irving with what looks like a dodgy black perm and he looks so unlike the Gere we know that he manages to convince.

Although the film is about the trickery involved in fooling his publicist, the publishers and their legal advisors, it is also a close study of friendship and relationships. Irving’s friend joins him rather reluctantly in the venture, which is a sort of literary hussle, but fails to put a brake on the increasingly complicated and unnerving fraud, while Irving’s wife has concerns about his easy lying in his private life.

Irving’s obsession with Hughes grows, and threatens to disrupt his life; he becomes almost deluded and paranoiac. Hallström weaves in sinister scenes which provide terrific tension, making the film a literary thriller. Irving comes to believe that Hughes wants to use him as a tool to topple Nixon’s corrupt government, so what started out as a desire to write a publishable book becomes a deranged mission to take on the White House and the CIA, to tell the truth and make a difference to the world. Was Irving going off the rails or was he a tool and a scapegoat? Hughes' power combined with our suspicion of CIA activities at the time of the Nixon administration, intimate that it could be possible.

Whatever is the real truth, Irving and his close relationships suffer from his casual deceit and betrayal and the film is a fascinating study of a man whose love of story, lively imagination, agile thinking and determination are really impressive. It's a pity his talents didn’t work to his, and his loved ones, advantage. His confidence, fearlessness, and talent as an actor suggest a bold, courageous or desperate man, and make for a fascinating character study. Not sure if he's likeable though.

The History Boys. Alan Bennett. Dir Nicholas Hytner. September 2007.

2007-09-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

Alan Bennett wanted to write about a charismatic schoolmaster and has come up with Hector (Desmond Barrit) whose approach is to teach the boys poetry and songs; Hector’s view is that learning moving, insightful or just plain silly texts provide the antidote to the earnest love of 'words'. He has the boys acting, singing from musicals and speaking French rather than studying History, and his unorthodox style aims to provide them with cultural awareness and breadth.

These boys are ambitious and their Headmaster wants them to get into Oxford which will give the school a better ranking in the league tables so he brings in a young teacher, Irwin, to prepare the boys for the examination board by challenging the way they think about history. The play is about teaching, the way to open up young minds balanced against exam training, and Bennett’s play shows how a teaching career can be fulfilling but also limiting; the school is a nation in microcosm: flawed individuals doing their best in a public institution.

Despite knowing that the actors are not boys but young men, this is soon forgotten; their performances are engaging and funny, occasionally moving. Their tolerance of Hector’s weakness for them seems mature but it is also the way that young people accept the oddities of adults as long as there is no harm done. Irwin, however, is less convincing. He is repressed and consequently somewhat dampened which makes it hard to see how he captivates the boys as he does, enough to shake them out of their sparky cynicism, pay attention, and alter their thinking.

Foul language distracts from the first-class script; it’s not necessary. The History Boys is a thought-provoking play, with moments of great tenderness, terrific humour, and lively and convincing performances. Watching this play from far back in the theatre diminshes its impact; seeing it a second time closer to the stage reveals a far deeper meaning; minute changes in the actors' faces are visible, we can see the expression in their eyes alter, but further back, we are unable to read these subtle and highly significant signs. Go and see it but sit at the front of the class.

WAITRESS. Dir Adrienne Shelley. 2007

2007-09-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

A confection of a film this one, featuring no end of sickly pies baked by Jenna (Keri Russell) in a small town diner. She puts everything she has into the buttery crusts, creamy fillings and marshmallow toppings; it’s all melted bitter chocolate and caramel, but her life is lacklustre and unhappy, her husband is an insecure control freak and he is the obstacle to her creative and emotional fulfilment.

Funny and charming, the film’s humour surprises and delights whenever her git of a husband’s behaviour becomes too oppressive, and the story achieves a nice balance between eliciting sympathy and laughter. Having said that, husband Earl is nasty but not too nasty, and there are times when we wonder why she doesn’t tell him what a prat he really is.

Jenna is horrified to find she is pregnant and her real ambition is to win the pie making competition and open her own pie diner. The pregnancy and her medical consultations with a new doctor bring unexpected benefits. Charming and funny.

LA VIE EN ROSE. Dir Olivier Dahan. 2007

2007-09-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

Marion Cotillard is outstanding as Edith Piaf in Dahan's biography. Piaf’s classic songs are terrific and passionately delivered, and the film feels like a cinematic roller coaster ride of emotions and fragments from Piaf's life. The effect is of vivid but random memory recall, as though we are seeing moving snapshots taken through her life.

Dahan serves up a visual maelstrom, from Piaf as a small child left with her grandmother to be brought up in a brothel, through her years of success and arrogance, to her death, ravaged by drugs and alcohol. Loss follows loss, first her father takes her away from her mother, then she is torn from the arms of the prostitute she comes to love, and finally she is grief stricken at the death of her lover, boxer Marcel Cerdan. She never recovered from her broken heart, which caused her addiction to morphine, and her physical degeneration is shocking.

Cotillard's Piaf is outspoken and rough, drunk and mouthy, but occasionally vulnerable. The music is fantastic and Cotillard's performance is so riveting it feels as though we are watching Piaf herself. Despite witnessing her behaviour - brash, a bit trashy, sometimes pathetic, her character remains elusive.

Dahan's use of flashbacks flings the viewer from time to time and place to place, forwards and backwards in a breathless and almost bewildering sequence of unrelated events. Nevertheless, the film is gripping throughout, Piaf's progress upward and downward is compelling and, as the film reaches its climax as she sings her heart out, the power and heartfelt performance leaves this audience gaping at the screen in stunned silence.

THE GOLDEN DOOR. Dir Emanuelle Crialese. 2006

2007-08-21T09:18:00.000-07:00

Vincenzo Amato leads the cast in this story about leaving your homeland and dreaming of a golden future. Opening in Sicily, onto a landscape made up of nothing but stones it’s not much of a surprise that the farmers there are barely able to scrape a living. It’s an arid, barren, uncomfortable place, and the locals are firm believers in superstition; the biblical reference to seeds falling on stony ground is picked up later with the idea of being transplanted into more fertile soil in the United States.

Widower Salvatore Mancuso (Amato) and his little group are lured to America by doctored photographs of gigantic chickens and enormous vegetables. Crialese uses surreal sequences such as Mancuso swimming in a river of milk while a carrot bigger than himself floats by as relief from the scenes of difficulties and discomfort. Mancuso leaves with his aged mother, a healer and symbol of the Old World, his sons and two young women who have been ‘sold’ to wealthy Americans. These girls throw up a reminder of The Piano, young women going out to the colonies to marry strangers, and the cinematography is similarly atmospheric.

Filmed in three stages, there is the long walk from their Sicilian home wearing the clothes of dead villagers so they will look like kings when they arrive in the New World, the sea voyage, and the process of immigration at Ellis Island. On the journey Mancuso experiences hallucinations about the land of plenty, such as money falling from the stars, which keep him focussed on his bright future. On the boat, travelling third class, the Italians are loaded aboard like cattle and the camera is kept close-up forcing the chaos and overcrowding right in our faces and reinforcing the sense of claustrophobia and physical intimacy.

At Ellis Island the travellers are submitted to a clinical, scientific selection process; the land of progress assesses immigrants for ‘feeble-mindedness’ and medical shortcomings. The logic of only allowing the intelligent into America should therefore mean that all the following generations of Americans must be the brightest and most healthy on the planet. The coldness of this process is saved from being utterly repellent by using Mancuso’s viewpoint; he obediently follows every instruction and urges his group to do the same because he can see the reasoning behind it. All this, and they haven’t even had a glimpse of land.

One of the most difficult scenes to endure is the virtual horse-trading of the young women who have spent hours grooming and beautifying themselves before they step off the boat and arrive clothed in magnificent national dress, ribbons trailing and wearing head-dresses which appears to lift them from peasants to duchesses. They sit patiently in rows waiting to be ‘called out’ by American men looking for brides. It is excruciating to watch but, we are rewarded by a hint of romance as gentlemanly, calm and affectionate Mancuso ‘calls out’ Lucy (Charlotte Gainsbourg), a young Englishwomen he has met on the journey. She wants a marriage of convenience but Crialese has the goodness to leave us with hope for a promising future, a possible marriage of native wit (Mancuso) and sophistication (Gainsbourg) or, the old world and the new.

PARIS, JE T’AIME. Dir Various. 2006

2007-08-14T06:53:00.001-07:00

Twenty-one directors contribute a short film each to make up this homage to Paris, and the international cast make this a cosmopolitan collection.

There are cranky American and British divorcees (incl Bob Hoskins), a grieving Frenchwoman (Juliet Binoche), a stoned actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal), amongst the characters, and there is more than a hint of the mystical in many of the shorts.

They range from the comic and surreal to the poignant, and there’s even a vampire romance. Watching these quite different films one after another plays havoc with the emotions; each film draw you in, absorbs you in its mini drama, then abandons you, only for you to be picked up by the next story and manipulated all over again, twenty-one times, with no time to let the sensations settle. So much material, so many storylines, baffling, charming, quirky and delightful.

Under pressure

2007-08-14T05:24:00.000-07:00

No posts for so long? Bin’ working innit? Deadlines, you know the drill.

Okay, I just need to whine now, for quite some time.

Can’t print, won’t print? Phone the helpline. Spend the next forty minutes moving all your furniture, pulling out your printer and your computer, disconnecting cables from the back, trying to find numbers that are unreachable and, when you find them, are printed so small that they are indecipherable to the naked eye.

The man in Delhi or Bombay may have a little trouble understanding RP English but it doesn’t matter if he thinks your name’s Samantha when it’s Amanda, or that everything you say has to be spelled out using the phonic alphabet: name, address, serial numbers, ad nauseam, because he’s been trained to say, “Thank you for your patience,” at frequent intervals. He can’t see me crawling round on the carpet with my office in a state of chaos, and so 'impatient' I am almost in tears.

His advice: to unplug cables and plug them in again. I could have done this without the forty minutes of impenetrable conversation. I have to be forceful, “I’m sorry, but I have no patience for this,” and I have to repeat it, firmly, before I can replace the receiver. Never let them see you bleed.

I am left alone in the wreck of my office, wires and entrails everywhere, but at least I no longer have to try to make myself understood. Always communication isn't it? Partners, PCs, helplines. 'There is a problem communicating with your ...'- insert selection of your choice here. Heeeeeeeeelp………

Bedroom Farce. Alan Ayckbourn. Dir Robin Herford. July 2007

2007-07-19T03:27:00.000-07:00

Four married couples feature in this play which presents their very different relationships over the course of one farcical evening, on into the early hours. Delia and Ernest are celebrating their wedding anniversary while Malcolm and Kate are having a housewarming party. Nick has a bad back so has to stay at home in bed; his wife Jan goes to the party without him, where she bumps into old flame Trevor who is having a row with his depressed and distracted wife Susannah.

The stage set cleverly presents three bedrooms; lighting and action moves audience attention from one to another, and there is an intelligent use of space and timing. Moments of intensity from neurotic Trevor and Susannah are relieved by comedy, while Jan and Nick’s bickering and jibes are also offset with some humour.

Herford directs a well known cast but it is always apparent that they are acting. Only James Midgley and Natalie Cassidy work with perfect comic timing, which makes an audience forget they are delivering lines. They both fully engage with other members of the cast which makes for convincing theatre and excellent entertainment. Hannah Yelland, whilst having strong, clear enunciation, delivers all her lines to the audience and not to her fellow actors which feels surprisingly uncomfortable. She and Beth Cordingly are given parts to play which are never going to evoke audience sympathy: Jan is brittle and Susannah is a casualty. Trevor’s self-obsession is worse. Unfortunately, he is so repellent that one wonders why any woman would want to be married to him, even Susannah.

Marital sniping is not a pleasant thing to watch but the comedy is nicely done. Audience comments were that it felt a bit dated, and that the ending was inconclusive. It may be fair to say there are elements of the 1950s about Delia and Ernest and the lack of chemistry between the two dysfunctional couples does not suggest satisfying resolution at the end but, on the whole, Jolly Good Show.

TAKING LIBERTIES. Dir Chris Atkins. 2007

2007-07-17T04:10:00.000-07:00

Atkins weaves graphics, documentary and news footage, personal stories and information about legislation to expose the deeply disturbing changes that have come about in the UK over the last ten years.

Comments are from human rights organizations, politicians, academics and lawyers, and the film focuses on ordinary people who have had enough. They feel compelled to protest and complain about the loss of civil liberties such as freedom of speech, (which has always been sacrosanct in Britain), being presumed innocent until proven guilty, our rights to privacy, the illegality of torture, and the rest.

The Police are used as Government tools to control the unruly population who, when peacefully protesting, are now considered a security risk and a terrorist threat. One busload of women on their way to a peaceful protest were imprisoned in their coach and escorted back to London by a motorcade of police outriders and vans. They were unable to get off the coach for a toilet or drink stop. Distressed, but not daunted, the women took the case to court and won.

A couple of elderly ladies were filmed outside a military base. Standing in lovely open countryside, chatting amiably, a policeman approached and wanted to know what they were doing there. He asked for their details. Now savvy, these women know that they are not required by law to provide this information unless there is a good reason for requiring it. He went away. I felt a bit sorry for him, for having to carry out such a ridiculous task. It insults the intelligence of officers to be used in this way by the arms industry.

Other protesters who sit quietly outside companies where Guantanamo shackles are made, or where missile parts are manufactured are subjected to heavy-handed policing. Whilst protesters outside your factory may be unsightly and a nuisance, their presence is not illegal. It is now.

New Labour has also presided over a rise in house prices so great that the UK now has a seriously divided population, hardly a socialist achievement. There has not been such a gulf between rich and poor for about forty years.

Of all the examples shown in the film, the persecution and harassment of Muslims is very troubling. One young man, despite being acquitted, remains under house arrest. It looks like racism, and suggests a Government view that all Muslims must be potential terrorists, but this would be like saying that, in the time of the Irish troubles, that all Irish were IRA terrorists.

Making and exploding bombs is a criminal act, possibly a psychotic act. Such people are murderers. Isolated terrorist attacks have produced a Government hysteria that has resulted in blanket policies which restrict innocent law abiding citizens. If people protest they become labelled as criminals for objecting to unreasonable imposed limitations. ID cards will not prevent murders.

But, by far the most disturbing part of the documentary for me was being made aware of the level of surveillance in the UK today. Information is necessary and useful but any unqualified idiot can be employed to sit and watch CCTV cameras, medical and tax records can be misused, and computers can fail. These records provide a directory which makes ‘ethnic cleansing’ swift and efficient. The parallels with Nazi Germany are too terrifying to contemplate.

And what do I hear on the news this morning? That the Government Chief Medical Officer, Liam Donaldson, believes it must be compulsory for our bodies to be cut up and used for the benefit of other people when we die. Our bodies. Make that government bodies. I pray this is not true. Being an organ donor must be a choice. Anything else brings up connotations of farming or, God forbid, our skin being used for lampshades, our hair being used to stuff mattresses. The root of all evil is fear. This organ donor panic is about fear of death. It’s inevitable. Becoming a virtual prisoner in your own country is not.

All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Do something. Write to your MP. Something. You have a voice. We all do. Use it.

Enlightened at Dartington Literature Festival

2007-07-16T08:25:00.000-07:00

Just spent a happy few days at the Festival of Words and Ideas at Dartington. Hard to know whether the talks are more fascinating than the audience. Am sated with stimulating conversation. Heaven on earth to spend time with other writers and avid readers, people of passion.

On Resurgence Day we were treated to talks by Brian Goodwin and Satish Kumar. Goodwin says he is ‘embedded in the evolutionary process’ and his desire is to articulate that ‘culture is embedded in nature’ not something separate, a construct, apart from it.

He emphasizes that, at Schumacher College, study is focussed on the ‘meaning’ in the natural world, which is different from studying the natural world in order to control it. In nature, all is death and transformation.

His argument that meaning tends to be associated with language and culture rather than the existence and life of things implies a chasm between the two, that thought and the intellect have moved to inhabit a separate sphere from nature. He says ‘we are trying to control the uncontrollable – the basis of creativity.’

Instead he suggests we participate, and go into the heart of what is going on in any system: in our bodies for health, in our environments, and the economy or businesses. At Schumacher the idea is to analyze the whole of any organization, whether that be the study of beauty, health, wellbeing – the holistic vigour of a system.

Goodwin is a Biologist and says that qualities such as happiness or pain have usually been discounted in scientific studies as these are not easily quantifiable. But, he affirms, these are important indicators of complex systems, and we must not ignore them.

We need to ‘do science in a more complete way.’ It must be analytical, qualitative, measurable, quantitative, but it must also study emergent qualities. He says the traditional form of knowledge, pre-Enlightenment, was Shamanic, that is with regard to the regulation of rhythm. Rhythms are everywhere in nature and in all systems; we can see this in flowers and plants, but can we test for them?

He believes that mechanical causality is useful but a deeper principle is more important. He suggests that ‘people need to be become invisible, as do other organisms, through integration and participation,’ and that this ‘will bring meaning back into our lives big time.’ This reminds me of an exercise children are sometimes asked to do in primary school – to sit, silent and motionless, amongst foliage, and simply ‘be’ to see how it feels and what they notice. A very powerful exercise if you can get the child to understand why he is there.

Returning to language and culture, he seeks to remind us that ‘conversation goes on in nature all the time,’ that language is everywhere, metaphorically and literally.’

His message is a very optimistic one: that we are recovering a sense of our role which, although not easy is so worthwhile. Although we may have no clearly defined objective we can feel the direction, become engaged, embedded. He calls this our ‘transition culture’ and says he welcomes this ‘age of meaning.’

It’s an interesting reversal. How long it has taken for a general shift away from the empirical, scientific ways of understanding the world. He says that our ‘new way of seeing the world is also the old way – which had become fragmented.’ This puts me in mind of agriculture. Farming was always carried out in rhythm with the seasons until science analyzed it to death.

Since the 1960s food production has become increasingly isolated from peoples’ lives and supermarket shopping is the result, with animal welfare, haulage and chemical sprays being the obvious concerns.

He emphasizes that ‘local is where the power is,’ that civil society is in transition, and we have a new respect for place. Community, co-operation and communication are the answer.

Satish Kumar adds that Art and Science meet in the same place. He believes that they will cease to exist separately. He also believes that intuition – our organ of perception – needs to be developed, along with our feelings.

Nature, death, transformation. All is circular. Beauty and creativity is central to life. This is not to say that the Enlightenment principles must be thrown out with the bathwater, but knowledge must be integrated with intuition and creativity. Hallelujah.

Let’s hear it for the small, local producers, theatre collectives, small businesses, community vegetable growing co-operatives, and team-work. Way to go. I so prefer this positive, life-affirming approach to the current, brow-beating, guilt-inducing, minute-by-minute assault by the whole range of media about the dangers of climate change.

For a whole hour I did not hear the dreaded phrase which makes me want to rebel, turn all my electrical equipment on and fly around the world. Goodwin and Kumar make me want to plant vegetables and share them with my neighbours.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 26

2007-07-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

Okay. Another interest rise. The market has ground to a halt here.

The smart people had put their properties on the market in May, to avoid having to have the HIP. If they accepted offers then, they’re alright now.

The market has become saturated with properties. Overpriced, unattractive properties down here. So, it’s a buyer’s market. There’s so much to choose from that no-one’s choosing.

However, in an auction I attended last week, a 3.8 acre parcel of pasture land sold for 60K. Buy land, they ain't makin' it anymore. In fifty years you could maybe get planning permission for your grandchildren.

I’ve only been in this job for nine months and, in that time, we’ve gone from being rushed off our feet and selling houses before we’ve had a chance to get them advertised in the paper, to being stuck with hundreds of them.

My own job, doing all the Saturday viewings, has changed from racing about like a headless chicken to try and fit in all the appointments, missing lunch etc, whining about that quite a lot, trying to fit 13 viewings into a seven hour day to only having 3 appointments today, one of which was cancelled.

I noticed a month or two ago that landlords are beginning to sell off their rental properties here. Now, the houses we’re selling are starting to come down in price. Not much; between 3-5K. Sellers are nervous; buyers are being cautious. At the end of last month we had seven properties fall through. One or two is usual. This looks like last minute doubts because of increased mortgage repayments.

Not good. I wonder what Chancellor Gordon will do to prevent freefall.

I have a feeling I may be let go at the end of my contract. Could be a whole new life up ahead.

JINDABYNE. Dir Ray Lawrence. 2006

2007-07-02T11:05:00.000-07:00

Set in Australia and based on a short story by Raymond Carver, ‘So Much Water So Close To Home,’ Jindabyne is a slow moving psychological drama. The town of the title is small, enclosed, and stifling. Everyone knows everyone’s business yet there is sense of real unease percolating through every piece of dialogue from the beginning. There is no soundtrack; the film is shot in silence and minimal dialogue, but singing overlaid on the landscape shots is very disturbing. Hostility is everywhere.

Stewart and his friends go off on a weekend fishing trip, and, on the Friday, find the dead body of a murdered woman floating in the water. Their decision to leave her there, and not report the crime until they return is a mistake in judgement that has repercussions which reverberate throughout their community on their return.

Misunderstanding, failure to tell the truth, and the apportionment of blame are the themes here. Laura Linney is superb as Clare, Stewart’s wife, who has also made a mistake – that of falling victim to post natal depression. She is reminded of her lapse throughout the film; by her husband, mother-in-law, and supposed friends. In a community this parochial, nothing is forgotten or, it seems, forgiven.

There is also stigma to consider, and there are various victims. The murdered girl is Aboriginal, and the partially divided community fractures further. Stewart’s apparent callousness in not reporting his find is socially repellent and it drives Clare away from him. There is also a stigmatized motherless child whose motives are constantly misread.

Clare needs to understand, to seek reparation but Stewart is a pragmatist who does not feel the need to justify himself. He says, “She was beyond help,” but one needs to be seen to be doing the right thing. He loses the respect of the community: Clare never had it. He needs to reclaim it. The murderer remains outside the drama.

Acting is first-class although American accents in an Australian film are a bit confusing. The scenery is as arid and empty as the relationships, and there is a strong sense that there is no social glue. The contrast between the colonial settlers and the native people couldn’t be more marked and the tightness of the little Aboriginal community is subtly portrayed. The privacy of the funeral scene sets up the white people as invaders of an ancient culture, intruding upon their dignity and suffering. Fascinating but would have benefited from more pace.

Sex-Less-Clothes

2007-07-01T11:02:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of excitement in the Press just now, with two car bomb threats averted in London and another at Glasgow Airport. It strikes me as deeply chilling that the London bomb attempts were targeted near nightclubs where hundreds of young people and, in particular, slags (sic) would have been killed or maimed. This is not a terrorist attack against capitalism or even Christianity, or a general lack of faith in the UK but an attack on our women.

In the same newspaper I read an article about a magistrate who is apologizing for his unprofessional conduct when he walked out of the Courtroom because a young Muslim woman appeared before him in a hijab with a mere slit for her eyes to peep through.

I have no idea what she had done to require a presence before the beak, but identity must surely be called into question in Court. She is apparently hurt and outraged at being asked to unveil where men are present. However, anyone could have been under that veil, her uncle for instance, sent along in disguise to act on her behalf.

In post offices up and down the country, sample photographs demonstrate the acceptable identification requirement for a passport. A woman can be veiled around the face but her face needs to be visible in a UK court of law. Being tried by a panel of women is a possibility but UK laws apply in UK Courts, as surely as western women need to comply when in Muslim countries, as did the female naval officer who was obliged to be veiled during the period of her captivity in the recent detention of sailors.

The most terrifying thing to me about the whole need for a Muslim woman to be veiled and covered is the stated impossibility for Muslim men to ‘control themselves’ in the presence of a woman revealing any hair or skin. Even westernized Muslim women talk about the need to cover up in their home countries because they feel so vulnerable; at risk of attack or rape.

Friends laugh at me for saying that western young women show off too much flesh, and that I’m a bit old fashioned as far as cleavage and thigh flashing goes. I am generally in favour of modesty, and nicely cut clothes – elegance over obviousness. A bit of mystery is quite attractive I think, and I’d far rather see a man in a good shirt and well tailored pair of trousers than walking along the street in a wife-beater vest and too-short shorts, with all his skin on display. Men look good in suits as they create the illusion that there's a pair of shoulders under there.

But, as for these two extremes of women’s dressing, the very idea that a young woman in her prime, wanting to put all her goods on display for late night revellers in London should be murdered for doing so is too bizarre to comprehend.

The sub-text here is that certain extremist Muslim men are thwarted and severely repressed by the tight restrictions on their own and their countrywomen’s sexuality. They therefore seek to release that frustration by destroying free, healthy, uninhibited young British women. Such extremists have no understanding of what it is to be carefree and sexually confident.

I don’t advocate going out on the town jiggling around in a low cut top and too-short skirt and ridiculous heels but aren’t these girls just showing off? They are not saying they want to be raped, or that they will have sex with anyone, indiscriminately. If we put goods for sale on market stalls and in shops up and down the country, however tempting the fruit or produce may be to the browser, the shopkeeper is not saying “here, just help yourself,” but, “isn’t my produce the most appealing in the street?” But, if they don't cover up a bit, they'll catch their death.

Tolerance, gentleman, please. Self-control. Restraint. Education. Understanding. Live and let live. Mind your own business. Live within a culture that you can respect, not within one you despise.

AWAY FROM HER. Dir Sarah Polley. 2007

2007-06-26T12:56:00.001-07:00

Fiona and Grant have been married for 44 years. Filmed in Canada, the beautiful snowscapes, sunlight on snow, and red tinted sunsets, make a fitting backdrop to Julie Christie’s cool, elegant beauty.

She plays the wife of a retired University lecturer Grant, (Gordon Pinsent), who succumbs to the early onset of Alzheimer’s. At first it troubles her, then it intrigues her and she says she feels as though she is ‘disappearing.’

It is she who decides when it is time for her to go into a home, who instigates the process and, when they arrive, who determinedly checks herself in. She bravely comments that it will be like staying at an hotel. What other line can she take? Grant’s quietly desperate attempts to dissuade her only threaten her fortitude. She has to be strong for them both.

It is hard for her to say goodbye too, but it is so much harder for Grant to go home and be without her. It is always hardest to be the one left behind. The unkindest cut of all is that the home insists on a thirty day period of ‘cold turkey’ when the new inpatient may have no visitors. Grant visits her at the end of this time to discover that he is erased from her memory and, instead, she has formed a new attachment to another inmate.

The film focuses on her mental decline, with Alzheimer’s being compared to a house with the lights going off one by one, and on her resulting physical decline. Her ladylike poise degenerates into unkempt distraction. It is an excruciatingly painful focus on loss and loneliness and runs the risk of being too much to bear. There is no hope: there is only one way for her to go.

True love is selfless and it is Grant’s turn to think only of her happiness. It seems almost his opportunity for making amends and Polley’s film is testament to the depth of enduring, accepting love. Fine performances by Christie and Pinsent carry the unremitting misery with great sensitivity and intelligence.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 25

2007-06-24T14:31:00.001-07:00

I am getting to know Ella a little bit. I have been out to the rambling old cottage quite a few times now, showing folks round. She usually keeps out of the way, as though she doesn’t want to be involved in the process.

Today, she’s inside with her family, and we pass through the rooms as respectfully as we can, aware of her sensitivity towards the old house. With a cup of tea, her daughter and her grandchildren, she is confined to one small room while we have free range of her home.

After the first couple have left I go in and sit down to talk to her. They have made an offer of 500K and want to go for an immediate exchange of contracts, legals permitting, with a completion date set for September. This is a reasonable timescale. She looks worried, unhappy. “I don’t know.” She says.

She tells me she wants her original buyers to have the house although they are now unable to proceed because their own sale fell through. She says that she ‘clicked’ with them; that they fell in love with the house, and it’s important to her.

She is something of a family custodian. She is now the grandmother and matriarch as well as the keeper of all the family memory; photographs, furniture, birth and death certificates. She looks very sad and tells me that a second buyer who was proceeding with the purchase wanted to knock the whole place down and build something new on the site. The thought of this clearly causes her pain.

I don’t have the heart to tell her that this is exactly what the couple that have just made this offer are likely to do. It would be like an attack on her, on her body.

The old place is ramshackle, mis-shapen, awkward. The pipe work for the plumbing runs all over it in a labyrinthine, haphazard way. Wiring likewise. There is no heating. The hot water system has broken down. The rooms are tiny, the ceilings low. It’s dark and claustrophobic. Despite all this, it has heart.

I hover somewhere between wanting her to take the money and move on with her life, yet I share her reluctance to sell to anyone, just for the money. Her desire to vet the next owners of the place that has been central to the life of her and her family for over 50 years is a desire I share. It may be a vanity to want new owners to love your home as much as you do, but if you care about houses, you care about who becomes the next custodian.

I leave her to think, and take round the next party. This couple have brought their dad along. He’s a retired builder; big, bluff and rather aggressive. He barks at me. “Have they used up all their percentage of planning permission for extensions?” I answer that, as the extensions are around fifty years old, I can’t say as I don’t know anything about planning law. He’s not mollified. After we’ve been round the garden, he stops short and confronts me, “What are those two buttresses doing?” He fixes me with a gimlet eye. I want to say that they’re holding up the wall of course, stupid. Instead I look him right in the eye as clear as bold as a child and say that I have absolutely no idea. I suggest that he consults a structural surveyor to check over the house and establish what they’re doing. He almost laughs. He seems to have been testing me, as though he can’t stand estate agents and actually thinks I am one. He wanted to see if I’d spin him a yarn I suppose, I don’t know.

Happily, this couple with their old dad are a pair of sweeties, and the husband loves gardening so he’s enjoying poking around and checking out all the greenery. I’m a bit happier with these two. The wife in the first couple was very keen to let me know that they had twelve acres where they’re living now; that they practically knocked their last place down and have made it absolutely beautiful, wonderful, with an orangery, it’s just fabulous. Is she boasting or am I just really envious? Madly, they want to move to Truro to be near the hospital in their retirement.

I try not to gasp in horror. That would be the worst hospital in the country for MRSA announced on the day’s news as I’m driving around. But, surely with an orangery they will have private health insurance, or a private nurse to wipe their arses. I’m interested that Ella could sense that those first two were not to her liking, even though she only saw them go by. A minute only for them to not appeal to her sensibilities. The first thing the wife said to me was, "What's going on over there?" She jerked her head towards a new farmhouse up the lane.

I admit to being taken aback. I hadn't a clue what she meant and it took a few minutes to get her to make herself clear. There's nothing 'going on' and it looks as though nothing has been going on for some time. Had there been diggers or even vans I could have understood her rather violent nimby suspicions.

Anyway, my appointments are stacked up too close again so I have to run away to the next one, and I have to leave the second party, the little trio, behind. Monsieur is very sympathetique and, with his love of gardening, he may just win Ella round. I will keep my fingers crossed all weekend that he ‘clicks’ with her too and she can be persuaded to let go of her deep emotional attachment to the family home, break out and make a new life. He may even make a better offer.

But maybe she should stay there. It’s quite a role keeping the family home and history intact; something of an honour, like the old knight guarding the Holy Grail. Burning old papers, distributing keepsakes and furniture dissipates the meaning of the whole.

When I get back to the office and tell my colleague of the day’s happenings, she snaps, “I’ll ring Ella. She needs to make up her bloody mind. We want the money.”

THE PAINTED VEIL. Dir John Curran. 2006

2007-06-19T10:42:00.000-07:00

This is a remake of a 1934 classic starring Greta Garbo and is based on a novel by Somerset Maugham. Kitty is a bored, rather empty, piano playing socialite with an overbearing mother who wants her to get married because that’s what girls do (it's set in the 1920s). Kitty likes dancing, playing tennis, and has never been in love. Along comes a rather serious but unexciting bacteriologist to woo her; Kitty accepts his proposal, and they leave for Shanghai. Kitty has escaped from her mother only to succumb to a deeper boredom amongst the colonial set.

She embarks on a passionate affair with a diplomat, is discovered, and she becomes victim to the intensity of her husband’s feelings of rejection, pain and anger at her infidelity. His punishment is to take her into rural China where there is a severe cholera outbreak.

It is a study of repressed emotion and correct behaviour, and it makes horribly uncomfortable viewing with its sense of being trapped in a loveless marriage, and worse, a vindictive marriage. It is a story about revenge, forgiveness, isolation and the simple need for love.

Visually gorgeous, with steep, pointed mountains and languid rivers, there is a sense of humidity and oppressive heat; the audience is transported into another world and another time. I love the feminine shoes and dresses made in soft linen and cotton lawn. Having grown up watching films from the 1940s, films made overseas hold an enticing glamour for me. It is exotic travel, social history, heat and strangeness. It is eco-tourism at its most efficient. We don’t need to fly there.

BBC Question Time, 7 June 2007

2007-06-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

It’s fascinating to see the BBC setting up for Question Time - two enormous lorries filled with a mass of recording equipment arrive early in the morning and spend all day unloading. They set up six cameras, the set, computers, televisions and enough cabling to go round the world twice. A team of men in black put everything together and a security team frisks all the audience as they come in, while four local policemen contribute their presence. They omit to frisk the stewards which is interesting, as any one of them could have some polonium to spray on Boris Berezovsky. They can't have read any John Le Carre or Claire Francis novels or they'd have realized what a strong possibility this is in the provinces.

Berezovsky’s a brave man who says he feels safe in England, yet I don’t see any security men on the stage door side of the building. The whole team is at the other entrance checking people’s bags and scanning them with detectors. Progress into the building is slow.

Other panellists are politicians Tony Benn, Julia Goldsworthy, Francis Maude and the journalist and author, Melanie Phillips. They’re less likely to attract an assassin but you never know. Melanie Phillips is extremely right wing and antagonizes other panel member as well as the audience when she states that she doesn’t go along with the drive to be ‘green’ because environmentalists are politically manipulating the whole debate. She doesn’t take it seriously and resents ‘ambitious environmentalism.’ There are hisses and moans, and Julia Goldsworthy frowns hard and shakes her head, but it is Francis Maude that takes her on.

Phillips also makes the astonishing assertion that there are no non-British people living in Britain, but that we are all British citizens. There are many thousands of people living and working in Britain either temporarily, or long-term, who do not have British citizenship, and who may have no intention of taking it.

Tony Benn answers every question with measured reason. He repeatedly argues that democracy, tolerance and co-operation are the only ways for society and the world to co-exist and survive. His anti-war stance is well known and he re-asserts his antipathy towards nuclear arms in his responses this evening, saying, ‘nuclear weapons are a desperate threat to the human race.’

Discussions about Putin and concerns about Russian nuclear armaments dominate the evening which is unsurprising when Berezovsky is here but it is an intense debate which benefited from a little easing of the tension. Julia Goldsworthy is impressive in her intelligence, calm reasoning and clarity. She takes notes and listens with an admirable focus, is strong in her opinions and unafraid to tackle other panellists head-on.

I've volunteered to be the 'runner' for this because I’ve had no exercise today and this involves going through, and up and down the three-storey building a few dozen times with the questions for the panel, so I get to read them before I hand them over. The audience has been rigorously selected through the BBC Question Time website so I assume the questions will be intelligent and considered. There’s a heavy quota of questions whining about the logo for the Olympics and it's surprising how many people have made spelling mistakes. Tut tut.

The audience watch news transmitted by all channels while they have tea and biscuits. I run upstairs, and hand over their questions, after smirking at the mis-spellings, and they are put in piles under topics. David Dimbleby and his team watch up-to-date televised news and his researchers check for the latest information which relates to the questions and any breaking news. That’s 150 questions to sort, narrow down to a selection of eight, expecting only four or five to be used, and gathering any relevant data. It’s a great opportunity to see how the programme is put together – an efficient, polite team, working in an orderly, friendly, well-oiled way, demonstrating a neat piece of co-operation that should warm the heart of Tony Benn. And nobody got assassinated.

Manic Street Preachers, Truro, 3rd June 2007

2007-06-04T14:03:00.000-07:00

There are 1800 folk in tonight for a gig that sold out in just over an hour. The Manics were in Bristol last night, and Truro has drawn in this huge crowd from Devon and all around the west country, the Celtic fringe, all in great spirits, all looking forward to a good night. If people were smart and checked the ticket prices maybe they’d think it worth the drive down to Cornwall for tickets at £25 compared to £59 at Brighton and £65 at Southampton. Hey, good deal. We’re cheap down here.

The security guys are a nice bunch of lads, enormous, and very polite. One guy stands next to me and accidentally brushes my face with his arm; he’s so big he can’t see me down here as he scans the floor from his vantage point. I look up to see what it was that bumped me in the dark, and connect my face with his upper arm – my head doesn’t even reach his shoulder. Ridiculous. I’m not small. What on earth did his mother feed him on? He’s got to be 6ft 8ins at least. Good manners though. He’s one of those gentle giants I suppose, so I keep hoping a fight will break out, or a drunk will get mouthy, simply so that I can see him in action; silent and swift, or heavy handed and hard.

It’s a largely masculine audience. The music is purposeful, strong, loud. The band are terrific, the singing spot on, and the whole set offers a wide mix of music. Singing styles and sound are varied, with one number reminiscent of Sting and the Police, one with a bit of a Runrig feel, soulful ballads and punk blasts. It’s a great range, tightly performed with real verve. They finish off with their crowd pleasing hit single, 'A Design For Life,' and people just don’t want to leave. They hang over the stage, gazing at the roadies dismantling the set, wistful and happy. Good vibrations.

Daylight Robbery

2007-06-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

It’s been 25 degrees in London and I step onto the Penzance train, relieved to be in the cool. I’m in an inside airline seat and a man in his forties sits on the outside seat. I say hello and get on with the serious business of eating my train picnic. His train picnic is a bottle of white wine and a newspaper.

I wake from my post-prandial nap to find him chuckling over a news story. He enlightens me. He’s disposed to chat. Uh huh. Only five hours to go. How is this one going to play out? Not always wise to get friendly so early on a long journey, when one of us is trapped in the inside seat.

He’s looking forward to a few days in Cornwall, he says. He loves Cornwall.
Me: It’s okay - if it wasn’t cloudy all the time. At least you can see the sun in London.

He doesn’t know me, and can’t decipher that this means I am feeling grumpy and not very friendly right now and, more importantly, I am protecting my psychological and physical space.

If I liked the look of him, I would have been playful and he could have taken this as a joke, but I am not being playful and I really don’t like the look of his deep set eyes, so deep they are buried somewhere in his face, and I have to peer into his head to see them. As I peer at them I wish I hadn’t, as if I am tainted in some way.

He tells me that the weather is always great in Cornwall. I think it’s marvellous that he knows this for a fact when he doesn't live there.

Me: The maritime air causes a great deal of cloud and rain. It’s unusual for there not to be cloud cover. It’s quite depressing living under Tupperware, you know. North of Exeter is a safer bet.

He’s having none of it. He says if it’s bad weather you can always drive to the other coast, and I have to remind him that this is not possible when you are working. Gee, tourists. Of course you can escape when you’re on holiday. Give me a break, why doncha?

He tells me he has had a stressful day, a stressful week. I nod, but not sympathetically. Counselling is £40-50 an hour. I’m not being paid, and I’ve heard it all before anyway. He tells me about a lot of things (I realize that he is an ‘expert’) including that housing prices are falling and he has had to offload a few of his houses, as it’s too much of a nuisance having several properties. He usually stays in St Mawes, he says, and names the most expensive hotel there. I am feeling besieged.

I tell him that I sell houses and that we are, in fact, rushed off our feet, that prices in Truro are as high as in London. He can’t understand why 10,000 new houses are to be built in Truro alone. I smile half-heartedly. Think - because people like you keep buying the ones locals could live in you jerk. He drinks more wine. He tells me that only three years ago houses in Cornwall were £40,000 and he could have bought one on his credit card. That’s it. I have reached the point of revulsion.

I almost illuminate him with the information that it is because London people have bought many existing houses that prices are so high, property for local people is scarce, and new homes are needed, but I sense it would be the beginning of pointless recrimination and, hell, we’re not married. He can argue with his wife. She rings. They argue. Someone else rings – his mistress? They argue. He turns to me and smiles.

“I wonder who’ll shout at me next.” He says his wife, two daughters and the dog have travelled down in the car while he has taken the train for some peace and quiet. He’s given her the wrong time; she’s waiting at the station after her long drive from London, hot, tired, and cross. I have a hideous, overwhelming sensation of déjà vu.

After a long silence he says he loves travelling on trains, that it’s great to talk to people. Yeah, great.

I pick up my book and read determinedly. He continues to drink. When the bottle of wine is finished, he goes off to the buffet car for Guinness.

When we get further down the line, he gets up and apologizes for seeming rude but he sees a seat with a table and is moving to that one. I slide down in my seat and thank heaven for my escape. Ten minutes later he’s back, offering for me to join him, and share his Guinness and nuts. No.

This is the longest journey from London to Truro that I can remember. I usually like it. People on trains are always pleasant and interesting. I just got a bum deal this time.

As I get up to leave the train, I see his head slumped forward onto his chest. I creep past, collect my luggage and stand in the corridor as the train hurtles through the dark, over the viaduct with the Cathedral spires pointing up into the night.

He'll wake up at the end of the line, in Penzance. I relent. I’m not sure if it’s his wife I’m sorry for. Hell, she chose him. But why do I feel it’s my responsibility to prevent her weekend being any worse than it is already? I tell a woman standing near him that he needs to wake up and get off. She refuses to go near him. She says he’s been drinking all the way down and she doesn’t want to get whacked. Eh? Whacked? On balance, I think I’d rather be whacked than bored to death.

I give him a shake and he springs to attention. In the corridor he thanks me, asks the time, and says, “I’m dead.” Yeah, mate. You may as well be. I wouldn’t want your money or your life.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 24

2007-05-29T16:33:00.000-07:00

En garde

I’ve been worrying about our newest member of staff. She’s fresh out of school, an absolute stunner, with a sweet nature, and she’s being sent out on viewings. I don’t like it. It has never occurred to me before to worry about being in an empty house with a stranger but I’m not happy about her being in that position. She may be fine. She may never have to deal with some old creep’s unwanted attentions. I mention my concerns several times but my colleagues, and this little cutie-pie, all look blankly at me as if I’m being neurotic. I let it go.

Today, for the first time, I’m sitting in my car and I know I’ve got an odd one. I see a man shuffling about near the house where I’m to meet my next client. I know he’s my man because he is walking strangely; he looks shifty and disturbing, and I wouldn’t go near him if I had a choice. Well, at least it’s me not the youngster who’s out here.

I stride up to him and act like I’m taller and wider than I really am. I’m very physical with the door and actively take up a lot of space when I step inside the house, speaking loudly and exhibiting masterful control of the situation. After a few minutes and a lot of time wasting in the garden I recognize that I’m putting off taking him upstairs.

It has to be done but I have a brainwave and send him up first. There’s no way I’m going to get cornered by this laddie. It’s a small place but I manage to stay behind him so that he has to enter the bedrooms while I stay in the hall and point at items of interest, still talking loudly and confidently, and filling the doorframe. I lead the way downstairs feeling pretty triumphant, let’s face it. I survived the two of us staring mutely at the large double bed. I am so intimidating.

I even think I may have made a sale. I smile broadly and hold out my hand for a solid shake, and closure. He looks deep into my eyes, takes my right hand firmly within his, then leans forward with his left hand as well, for a double clasp. I am outside, standing in the road, yet I feel stifled; held by his gaze, and enclosed by his hands.

I wonder what cute little Emily would have done, and I’m glad she didn’t have to.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 23

2007-05-28T12:39:00.000-07:00

Hot Bodies

The heat is intense today. My car is blue with a black interior and the sun on the metal is fierce and punishing. Even with the window open there is no relief. The sunroof has to stay closed because the ferocity of the burning sun is beyond bearing.

I’m showing a friendly, chatty elderly couple round a bungalow in suburban bungalow-land where there is no sound but the churning of some piece of workman’s equipment nearby. I stay with the plot all round the house, answering questions, being helpful, making suggestions, until we come to the front bedroom and I turn to admire the view.

Across the road are two workmen on the flat roof of a garage. One of them is facing us, wearing a baseball cap and bent slightly forward. All I can see is his perfect flat stomach; so flat that, as he bends, there are neat creases in the brown skin, as neat as pencil lines. He has not an ounce of fat covering his slim, naked upper body and trickles of sweat make tracks through the dirt on their way down to the waistband of his jeans. He stoops and straightens, rolling out pieces of asphalt, while next to him a vat of thick, black tar bubbles in the blistering heat. As he stands up and turns away he displays his divinely triangular shape, his broad shoulders tapering to tiny hips.

The couple are speaking to me. I am somewhere else completely. I have to return to the room, to my job, to the reality that across the road is an uneducated piece of meat labouring away over a stinking vat of tar and some nasty, scratchy asphalt.

But, nevertheless, all Cornish boys seem to be made in triangles; they’re really cute. The danger in these momentary distractions comes when I’m driving, each time I pass semi-clothed young men on beachside roads as they’re pulling their wetsuits on or off, standing butt naked and unconcerned beside their cars.

They’re doing all women a favour. A girlfriend and I look forward to the day we can join all those other elderly ladies sitting dreamily on the beaches, looking innocent, when really they’re admiring the form.

Lads, you are delightful; if you’ve got it, flaunt it. It’s only harmless window shopping after all.

The Cost of a Day

2007-05-27T12:42:00.000-07:00

I was pondering the unfairness of having to pay a man £340 to tile my bathroom which is the size of a telephone box. This chap is on £150 a day and a friend tells me this is an entirely reasonable wage for a man to expect, even though he left school early and went straight to work on a building site. He has not done my tiling particularly well, and he has left me with a huge amount of cleaning up to do.

I was thinking over my long-standing and deeply felt dislike of feminism; deeply felt because I feel that the initial ideals of equality have all gone horribly wrong and turned women into men instead of making us all people of honour, dignity and fairness. However, I was having to question my position on the basis of the equal pay argument because I don't know any women earning £150 a day.

Whilst mulling over this, I get a call from my mother. During a period when she was homeless, she took a job as a nanny to a 7 month old baby boy who lived on a small moorland estate, and raised him through his infancy. I remember him making his first wobbly steps, playing in the garden, on the beach, a chubby innocent in a world of carefree play.

Now, he is in Afghanistan; a serving Army officer. My mother has telephoned to tell me that he has killed his first man, a Taliban fighter. On almost the same day a young man in her village was involved in a car accident and paramedics spent two hours on the roadside trying to stabilize him before he could be moved to the hospital. He died.

The anomaly is disgusting. I remember hearing how our young friend was first smeared with blood from a dead fox, how he learned to paunch rabbits; my mother clucking with disapproval. Now he has been trained to see the enemy as a target, to aim and shoot without visualizing that his target has parents, brothers and sisters, perhaps a wife and children of his own, or he couldn’t pull the trigger.

Exposed from the waist up in his armoured tank, striking the familiar pose of a young, privileged buck out in the back of a Land Rover hunting for birds, deer, or rabbits on his home territory, this young man is vulnerable for the first time. Kill or be killed.

Conversely, the paramedics are trained to see all life as sacrosanct; to spare no effort in preserving a life, however tenuous the hold, however worthless the individual. It’s simplistic of me I know, but today I have an overwhelming desire that ALL young men the world over be trained as paramedics and not soldiers, for their own peace, and for world peace.

The value we place on things is entirely arbitrary. God help us and God help my young friend to live with himself. But, as long as there are wars - which looks like forever - decent boys will have a lot of cleaning up to do.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 22

2007-05-26T12:57:00.000-07:00

Overcoming Nature

Rose is in bed again. Each time I go out to visit the old cottage lately she has been in bed. Her asthma is so bad this time that she is taking steroids simply to breathe; to stay alive. There is an oxygen cylinder beside her bed. Out in the country, beyond calling distance of any neighbours, she has this for company, and to help her breathe at night until a doctor or an ambulance comes if she manages to phone.

She is all smiles, as always. Her eyes are large and direct, and shine her welcome. Her face is as open and fresh as a child’s. She does not look ill at all, but as sunny and as bright as this late spring day. She asks many questions about what I’m doing, and who I’m seeing, and how I’m getting along, but she is stoic and philosophical about herself. She is accustomed to being barely able to breathe and has adapted to the limitation after so many years of labouring for air.

My viewing party arrive and we crawl all over the 400 year old cottage, poking into its nooks and crannies, opening and shutting cupboards and peering into the barns and sheds. Inside, the ancient cob walls hold the silence and all is still and peaceful. Outside, the children run about, disappear behind trees and amongst mature shrubs, and re-emerge laughing. Full blown roses hang heavy against the cottage walls: they haven’t been pruned in years, and everywhere we look there are flowers turning their faces to the sun, full buds almost at the point of bursting open, and leaves green and vibrant. The only sounds are birdsong and the laughter of the children exploring the domestic wilderness.

This place is such a rarity. Here we have three acres of grounds, stocked with just about any plant, shrub or tree you could name, most of them settled in for decades; seeds being sown, sap rising, fruits forming, then all dying back and resting before starting the cycle again. Very simply maintained, this is a garden in which to sit and dream, to fall into drowsy reverie, and maybe sleep. But there is also a sense of vigour, of energetic, unrelenting life, that force of nature which is exhausting should you try to control it.

Yet what do my second viewing party want to do? We walk the boundary and, as I point out the variety of stunning Azaleas and Rhododendron, and look up to admire the magnificent copper beech, there is strident talk about the need to pull out all sorts, to clear trees, and tidy it all up, to get a ride on mower and keep it all neat. I’m thinking people with this absence of soul should go and buy a golf course if that’s the kind of garden they want; a sanitized, regulated, organized piece of ground with as much character as a sheet of vinyl.

I’m glad that Rose won’t be there to see it happen.

Julian Clary. A Young Man's Passage: Autobiography tour. Truro 17 May 2007.

2007-05-17T14:22:00.000-07:00

Put It To Julian …

“You’re a very spiritual person aren’t you?”

Clary is astonished: “Me?!”

“In your own way I think you are”

“Okaaay,” he says warily, “everyone likes to think they’re spiritual”

It’s a surreal moment. Known for his wit, and waspishness, Clary looks somewhat fazed during his question and answer session when a woman in the audience commandeers the roving microphone to “give him some advice.”

He listens to the animal healer, then pulls a face and grins hugely, “Oh, this is a scream. Are you going to tell me she’s going to get something wrong?”

She tells him repeatedly that in two years time he can expect his little dog, Valerie, to have a problem with her back left leg. She further expounds that she never charges a fee; that all genuine healers don’t charge. Clary promises that he’s taking her seriously. At the end of all this she wriggles in her seat and demonstrates that she has only one leg. I wonder if this is some kind of bizarre form of psychological projection onto Valerie.

He goes on to tell us that after his partner Christopher died, Clary took himself off to a spirit lodge in Hemel Hempstead which “turned out to be a garden shed. There were about twenty of us there. We paid about 25 quid each to go in and there were a lot of pale, sad looking women and we had to sit quietly in the dark and told not to make any noise.”

“The psychic came out and said he would channel. The first voice was a 12 year old boy, ‘Charlie’. The next voice was Kenneth Williams, ‘Oh ‘ello’. The psychic stood in front of my face saying ‘It’s Christopher. Thank you for looking after me.’ But, in the car, I thought 25 quid, ‘Oh ‘ello.’ And I wish to this day I’d stood up and said, 'Shut up you silly old fool' - but .. I’ll keep an eye on her left leg.”

Some people complain on their way out that the steward should have taken the mike away from her. He didn’t cut her off; the professional on stage has control.

Julian arrived in Truro with his dog and his producer, Marc Sinden, and ordered Champagne to celebrate his arrival in the West Country. He says in the eighties he cultivated an image of being demanding, insisting for a time that he wouldn’t travel in a maroon car, and he was indulged.

Relaxed and confident on stage, he’s attracted an audience of over 700 tonight, with everyone keen to hear about his transition from shy schoolboy to huge TV star, with a good helping of smut. Laughter is long and loud at the smut but there are many quiet moments when he talks about his life. Some people go as far as muttering that they hadn’t expected to hear him talk about himself, and didn’t want to, so I guess they were hoping for a whole evening of smut, seasoned with a few salacious or vicious bits of celebrity tittle tattle.

Clary has come to talk about his autobiography and quips that there is a sequel: ‘Further up my passage.’ He’s in introspective mood, thinking about his past, says his policeman father and probation officer mother gave him “a strong sense of right and wrong,” and he runs through a chronological account of his early years. He was beaten at St Benedict’s, his strict Catholic school, by a monk and says he always tells this story when he’s being interviewed; that journalists love it.

That school bred in him the motivation of his entire life; the desire to shock, and to demystify the mechanics of gay sex. For a moment he looks shy, a little vulnerable and, consequently, quite cute, as he says he is associated with ‘fisting’ because of remark he made about Norman Lamont,

“But, you know, I’ve never felt the need to go in for that,” and he demonstrates the correct shape of the hand for this activity – making a duck’s bill with it.

“I don’t know why fisting is thought of as a gay activity either. All you need is a hand and an arse and you’re laughing.” And, of course, the audience are. Don’t the Brits just love toilet humour?

He reels off a list of sexual partners but is self-deprecating about heterosexual love, saying he had a girlfriend for two years and that negotiating the female body must be similar to learning to fly a helicopter, that there are too many erogenous zones, and that such a great deal of foreplay is necessary one has to continue ‘ad nauseam.’ He looks weary at the memory.

One woman in the audience received a Valentine’s card from Clary when she was 10 and when he hears this he quips, “It never came to anything.” He’s incredulous that she should have come to live in Cornwall. Ever the city boy.

When he’s asked whether he will ever enter into a civil partnership he says he’s with a charming chap, but “I don’t know, I’m too fickle really.” He adds,

“I’ve been to one gay wedding which I thought would be a laugh but it was terribly moving.”

It seems that the desire to shock has passed and he appears before us tonight dressed in a blue suit looking neat and smart. It’s not a performance but more of an informal chat,

“I’m not a natural extrovert; I’m an introvert pretending to be an extrovert and the reason for all that make-up was as a sort of armour. Now I’m daring myself to come on stage without all that.”

Now he’s taken to writing more; beyond the gags,

“I always thought I’d write more and talk less and a just over a year ago, I was fed up.”

He bought a little house and has written a novel about a hugely well endowed skinhead rent boy which will be out in August 2007. He loves crime fiction and when told to write about what he enjoyed he combined two delights; murder and a “huge donger.”

Julian Clary writes a column for the New Statesman and his autobiography is currently available.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 21

2007-05-14T14:48:00.000-07:00

Before the dust has settled

There is a boiled egg left on the draining board, amongst a pile of washed dishes that have been left to dry. A bottle of medicine stands by the sink. More medicines are in the bathroom. The mirrored door of the bathroom cabinet is open, exposing a selection of ointments and tablets. These most personal items embarrass me and I slide the door closed before my first client arrives.

Waiting outside I feel very subdued. There is something extremely dispiriting about standing amongst the abandoned relics of a woman’s life. The flat has been vacated very suddenly, with signs of her interrupted life everywhere; on every surface, bits and pieces, clutter, normality.

Maybe it’s that sense of my presence being a kind of violation of her home, but I feel a bit irritable as the viewing party approach; a young man accompanied by his parents. I can’t tell if it’s me or them that makes the atmosphere uncomfortable. I go through the motions of smiling, hand shaking etc but I am very ill at ease. I explain that the property is being sold as part of a deceased estate and apologize for the untidiness indoors.

While we’re inside I keep wishing they would go. The mother’s manner is a bit forced. She treats her son like a teenager and makes repeated remarks about doing the vacuuming and telling him where he could store things, as if he can’t think for himself. I realize that she must be the one who wants her son to buy a place of his own, that she has grown tired of tidying up after him. The father says little except to criticize the property, and to ask negatively loaded questions about the lease, damp, or noise from the upstairs flat. The son is quiet and, if he has spent his lifetime with a dominant mother and a negative father, I think it would be a good thing for him to get his own place and some room to breathe.

Mother fusses about a wall at the back of the garden and is insistent that the family discover the meaning of this new wall. I wearily say that it is probably the end of an extension, that it is the boundary wall, and is not affecting the property we are seeing. She says something like “Well, we need to make sure they’re not putting up a three storey building there.”

“Yes, of course, Madam, I’m sure you’ll be able to see any plans at the Council offices.” As I say this she turns to her husband and asks if he’s seen any such plans going across his desk at work. Oh, he's in Planning. He would know then.

To my relief and delight a pleasant faced young man appears at the garden gate. He appears anxious not to disturb us but I go forward and practically embrace him. Here is a face that is all understanding and intelligence. Yes, he is certainly happy to wait until the family have finished, in a moment or two. He waits patiently, as I knew he would. He is my saviour come.

The parents manhandle their quiet boy away. I watch him go and hope he can soon break free.

I bound back to my second client who, now he does not need to be respectful to any other party, can indulge himself and look around openly. He is beaming and friendly. He is cheerful and positive. I adore him instantly. When I ask about travelling to work he says he is Head of English at a school some drive away. I am a snob when it comes to English ,and very prejudiced in favour of anyone who likes books and films, so I love him. Word people are good people. He bounds around and loves everything. Even though I am still sorry about us barging around amongst the dead woman’s things, it doesn’t feel so bad. He is sensitive, respectful and not disparaging.

Back at the office I ask who is selling the flat and if they can be asked to clear the place out, and in particular to get rid of such things as draining dishes, medicines, and the boiled egg. All my colleagues roll their eyes. One of them mentions the lavatory. I splutter with disapproval that the loo seat was up when I got there so I had to touch it to put it down. Eugh. This is nothing. Carl grimaces and says that when he arrived to measure up, the place stank, there was diarrhoea in the loo and he had to flush it; he leaned well back and used his foot on the handle.

Has this woman got such disrespectful relatives that they whack her little home straight on the market before her corpse has even cooled, and leave the mess of her dying in the uncleaned loo? For shame.

As good as a lamp post

2007-05-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

I don’t think I managed to sell anything at work today but I did manage to get lipstick on my skirt. It’s easy when you know how.

I think I’ll just call into this shop I’m passing and see if there is anything pretty that I simply have to buy, as it’s on my way home and all.

What am I thinking? I hate shopping. I’d rather stick pins in my eyes. Maybe I’m having one of those moments, when your mind has gone blank after a long day, and is not functioning on any level whatsoever.

I wander aimlessly round the store. I even pick up things I would never wear. Somehow, I manage to get a grip and propel myself to the automatic doors. See, it’s all so effortless you don’t even have to push anything; you can just drift around in a browsing haze of inattention, and drift right back out again, like shopping plankton.

It’s a huge relief to be back in the car park and I am congratulating myself on my self control when I see a small boy running ahead of me. He isn’t running like little boys usually do; all excitement, uncontrolled limbs and speed over efficiency; he’s really chunky, like a grown man, only in miniature.

My idle curiosity is awakened by his chunkiness and his stocky waddle and, just as I think he would look right at home on a farm, helping his dad heave bales of hay, or shoving pigs around the yard, he dodges between two cars: up comes one shoulder, then the other, and he’s rummaging round with his trousers. Oh, I say. He’s about to wee on the car wheel. Just like a dog. I scuttle off to my car feeling like I’ve been caught out perving at him as he grapples with his willy. They can't have indoor loos where he comes from. Funny little man.

International Gala Concert - Male Voice Choirs, Truro 5 May 2007

2007-05-07T02:26:00.000-07:00

When I was small I played snap, or pairs, with a favourite pack of cards. The pictures that had to be matched were children in their national costumes and I loved just looking at them and wondering what their lives were like. Nationalism has been a dirty word since the 1940s, with our post fascism and post-colonialism sensibilities, and homogeneity is making so much of the world seem bland but tonight, the wide range of difference is delightful in its variety.

On the day the SNP are celebrating in Scotland, the Hall for Cornwall is filled with choirs from all over the world; a celebration of nationalism and diversity. The farthest travelled are the Birralee Blokes from Australia, who open this evening's concert with three perfectly arranged and performed pieces. These guys all look under twenty years old and it’s great to see young men taking to choral singing, and great to hear that choirs are so keen to come to this annual series of concerts that some are having to wait a couple of years for a slot.

There are European choirs here too, and there’s a noticeable folk flavour to some of the pieces; although I’m expecting the traditional three part rhythm there are many in two, or four. It’s fascinating how many of the pieces performed have a strongly Eastern feel, taking the imagination to Russia and beyond. I remember last year’s concert where the Latvian and Estonian choirs had the audience in raptures. I guess folk music is in our very bones. I do hear it’s the new jazz.

The theatre is packed, and hot, and people are grumbling but it’s a small discomfort and anyway some people absolutely revel in complaining. The pleasure is all in absorbing the sounds as they thrill the air in the auditorium, and steal upon our ears, like a lover’s whisper. A few of the choirs have chosen to sing African melodies and these work their way through the body, tickle and soothe the spirit, to make an ancient, primal connection.

The Swedish Linkoping University Male Voice Choir creates a wonderful mood; their harmonies blend and tone to produce a glorious, uplifting sound. Hungary, Germany and Brittany are represented, and of course Wales and Cornwall. The full, deep voices of the Cornish choirs, and the angelic harmonies of the Dowlais Male Choir from Wales strike a particularly heart-warming note with me. I feel proud to be different, happy to identify with the Breton, Welsh and Cornish singers; my Celtic nations. Our histories are intriguing; I still wonder what all the different lives are like. Maybe I should go on a modern Grand Tour of old Europe - Celt in a VW goes East. Could be a book in it.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 20

2007-05-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

Give me a break

I have everything covered. In my car are two bottles of water, a packed lunch, a flask of tea and the essential chocolate, 70% cocoa because nothing less will do. I’m off to a racing start to meet thirteen sets of viewers and it’s house to house without a minute in between.

Now, here’s the snag. I had two cups of tea this morning before I picked up all the keys, property details and the viewing list and, by 10.00 am I need the loo. Every house I get to, the people are waiting for me, or the second set arrives right after the first so I can’t sneak into the bathroom. By 12.00 noon I am thankful for pelvic floor exercises. If I’d known this was going to happen I wouldn’t have drunk one of the bottles of water in the car.

I have to resort to lies in the end, saying to one couple that I have to go back inside to check the locks on the doors and windows before I go with them to the next place. They wait outside while I tear through to the bathroom knowing that, if the water’s turned off, there should be one flush left in the cistern. One of my colleagues mistakenly flushed a loo once to check if the water was on; she had a pee, then tried to flush it again. A ha. Water not on. She had to fish out the incriminating tissue and fling it in the garden. I wonder how she washed her hands.

Getting hungry now; trying to drive and rummage around in my bag to find something to eat, but it’s useless; I can't reach. I meet the next folk, do the viewing and so on. I’m getting really cranky now, and I’m late for the next place. So I phone and whine to my colleague in the office that I need time to drink, to have something to eat and to go to the loo. She suggests that I should go and wee behind a bush next time – then adds that it was a joke because I’m not laughing. Maybe my sense of humour is located in my stomach and it needs to be full up in order to function properly. Instead it is gurgling, growling and irascible.

I try to fool it by drinking my second bottle of water – it’s pretty hot in the car – but a fluids only day is not such a good idea. I wonder if I could get a reverse Platypus like hikers and runners use.

It’s 3.15. My last two viewings are with the same family. We are sensitively exploring the small Victorian terraced property where an old lady has recently died. It feels awkward wandering round amongst her things, squeezing upstairs past her stairlift and seeing her walking stick left hanging on the banister. We are respectful, and quiet, standing amongst her possessions, aware of her grieving family because we can see their photographs on the mantelpiece and it is clear that somebody is part way through bagging up and boxing items to be taken away.

But, humans are self-serving after all, and more affecting than the sad, vacated little house, is my bladder. I think I will have my chance, when the family head off to the next place but, to my astonishment, the woman asks if they can all come in my car. My car! She does not know what she is asking. My car is my mobile sitting room, mobile office, mobile cafeteria. I change clothes in it; I often sleep in it; and anyway I need some privacy to use the facilities right here where I am. Why won’t she just go away?

I agree, despite having no company car, and no public liability insurance, which is foolhardy, and heave all the junk out of the back seat into the boot. I realize too late that I’m operating my usual double standards. I didn’t object to having the nice looking young man and his father in my car last week. I lie for the second time today about needing to check the locks on the back door etc and, apologizing to the air as I run back indoors through to the bathroom, am relieved. The water is on.

Be warned, estate agents wee in your houses.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 19

2007-04-30T03:40:00.000-07:00

Wilful neglect

The virtual ruin fascinates me because it is almost untouched since it was built. The cupboards in the kitchen remain; the pantry and meat cupboard is under the steep staircase. It still has the original Victorian cast iron fireplaces in all the upstairs rooms and the original Victorian linoleum on the bedroom floors. Each square is made to look like a rug, and placed centrally on the wooden boards. Two are green and brown designs so are interesting although pretty drab, but I particularly like the one in the back bedroom which is a rosy pink with leaves and flowers - the back bedroom; with the soaking walls and the plaster which has just fallen off the wall in one great lump the size of a double bed.

The back walls of the house are soaking because the owner of the house has left it empty for some years, meaning to do some work on it, and not getting round to it, and he has allowed a broken gutter to pour many seasons of rain down the walls. This is also why the entire back section of the house is black from wet and mould.

Yes, this is the place where the same owner has told us off for mentioning the cracks. He says we're putting people off the property, that the cracks and splaying walls are not caused by anything structural. We now have the engineer’s report and the heavy roof needs to be tied to the walls. How long will it take before the handsome old Victorian house simply collapses under the strain?

He has refused an offer of 200K. Instead, he holds out for the full 220K. No garden, no parking, soon maybe, no house.

Use and Abuse

2007-04-22T08:55:00.000-07:00

Sitting outside in the evening sun with ice chinking in my gin and tonic, our chatter is interrupted by the mildly irritating, feeble piping of a child’s recorder. Five or so minutes later a little boy, aged about seven, is planted by the entrance door to the theatre, and carries on blowing down the damned thing. A woman folds a towel and places it by his feet. The boy’s little sister is placed alongside her brother; she’s about five. The woman walks up and down the piazza with a mobile phone clamped to her ear, talking incessantly. Sometimes she comes and sits with a man but they do not go near the two children.

The children are pale; they look miserable, and keep going over to the man and woman, but are brought back to the theatre door. It is not obvious the first time he does it, but the man makes a flamboyant gesture of bending forward, dropping coins onto the folded towel, giving a thumbs up sign to the little boy, smiling broadly and then walking away. He seemed to be a man in the street until I noticed he did this each time a crowd of people came towards the door.

People passed the children and smiled indulgently, perhaps thinking they were entrepreneurial youngsters hoping for some pocket money. One or two dropped a coin onto the towel. After only a few minutes, the boy returned to the man and woman, his eyes looking all over the place, his head down; uncertainty and awkwardness emanating from every pore.

When I glanced that way again, the tiny girl was standing alone above the towel. Pale, with white blonde hair, and a fragile body, her lips were puckered up to whistle but very little sound was coming out. She kept trying, but her attempts at whistling were fairly hit and miss; some theatre-goers found this quite charming.

I called the police, snitch that I am. I did not see the police arrive and I did not see the ‘family’ disappear.

On the way home I have a horrible thought; the woman was so swarthy, and the children were so pale; I wonder if people steal small children to use them as mini-beggars like this, keeping moving, away within twenty minutes before the police can get there. Whose children were they?

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 18

2007-04-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

You're not from round 'ere then?

I am surrounded by delightful young families, happily retired couples, or contented empty nesters, enjoying their return to pre-children companionship and some freedom from parental responsibility, as well as a large number of women who have escaped their marriages and bought a dog, preferring long walks and book clubs. One of the imbalanced things about living in the west country, as with living in the farther reaches of Scotland, is that there is a surfeit of single women and a dearth of suitable single men. The men are wage slaves, and to be found in the south-east whereas women, on the whole, like a bit of a view.

This must be the centrifugal effect, as though single women have been flung out from the frenzied middle of a dance, and have landed, like so many wallflowers on the hard chairs all around the dance hall. I can tell you; those chairs are hard; and sitting on them makes you invisible; not, however, to the sort of man who has an emotional disorder, a twitch, one eye and a limp. I have become known to my colleagues at work as the ‘weirdo magnet.’ It is hard to extricate myself from getting into unintended entanglements by merely pleading that I was only being friendly. I am so misunderstood.

I worked myself up into a frenzy of my own today, whirling like a Dervish from house to house with what felt like hundreds of people, and no time to engage properly with any of them, let alone to sell one of them anything and, to my utter astonishment, one man asked if he could take me out to dinner. I gaped at him. I have quite forgotten how to behave.

Ralph McTell, Truro, 19 April 2007

2007-04-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

Ralph's mates from Pentewan have all turned up in a mini bus to hear him sing and play, and he walks onto the stage looking comfortable; he's amongst friends. He's a big man; very charismatic, with a warm smile and a beguiling aura of powerful gentleness. He's relaxed, we're relaxed, and he sits with his guitar, chatting easily between songs, and playing with an easy familiarity with us, and with his material.

His guitar playing is intricate and playful; going from ragtime to blues to folk, and his voice is deep and rich. He comments that he's put together quite a serious programme for the two hours he's on stage; it's true that the lyrics are thoughtful and the subjects serious, but there is light material too; a tune about Laurel and Hardy, and one or two covers of old blues numbers. When he sings Streets of London there are happy sighs and the audience sing along very softly; as softly as a whisper. It feels as intimate as if we were just a few people singing contentedly together late at night in the dark as a party winds down, maybe the way we did as teenagers; children of the 60s and 70s.

The whole effect is very mellow; we're bathed in warmth and a deep peacefulness, which is meditative and pleasantly soporific. Live music often seems to have this tranquilizing effect, and Ralph walks quietly off the stage, sending the audience out into the night all smiling and looking profoundly calm. Sigh.

OLD JOY. Dir Kelly Reichardt. 2005

2007-04-15T01:50:00.000-07:00

Dropout Kurt arrives in town and calls up his old friend, earnest father-to-be Mark to suggest a camping trip out in the forest, away from the city. They haven’t seen each other for some time and the film suggests a desire for intimacy as well as a quest for peace.

Something of a lost soul, Kurt is emotional and, at times, to be pitied. He lives outside society, in a world of new age type retreats and travels, which seem to have left him out on the margins. In contrast, Mark has a home and a pregnant partner, and tunes his car radio in to phone-ins with much loud chat about the state of society in America but he seems only half alive.

They drive out of town, with the camera as passenger, which gazes out of the car window while a gorgeous soundtrack by Yo La Tengo sets a mellow mood. The use of extended silence makes me a little uneasy; it’s hard to get away from memories of Deliverance, and a sense of apprehension.

In the city, the glass of the car windows insulates us from the crowding and noise of modern living, whereas out in the Cascade Mountains, it also insulates us from natural beauty. Alongside the long (but not uncomfortable) silences between the two men, I am uncertain how much this suggests our insulation from one another. The men’s eyes rarely meet.

The minimal dialogue alerts us to interesting camerawork. There are lots of steeply angled shots, and Reichardt’s direction of Old Joy has the extraordinary effect of feminizing the two men in the film. There are long, lingering close ups of Mark’s eyes and lips, on Kurt’s legs (which are particularly elegant), on both of their narrow shoulders, longish hair and unfit looking bodies. It’s a far cry from Daniel Craig’s Bond, and the combination of the whole implies a lassitude, whilst establishing another way of gazing on the male body, and considering male relationships. It left me feeling really sad.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 17

2007-04-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

Good Evening Mr Bond

There are two couples to take round a little house on a new estate on the edge of town and I have strict instructions to make sure that the cat must not get out. I’m dreading this because I imagine a swift little beast slipping through our legs as soon as we open the front door. There’s no sign of it though and we all squeeze in, afraid to open the door wider than our sideways body widths, and close it with relief.

Monsieur Chat peeps seductively round a door frame leading into the living room, delicately places a furry paw onto the hall carpet and sways towards us, allowing his body to brush lingeringly against the paintwork.

Truly, this is Blofeldt’s cat. Condemned to a life indoors, his only pleasures are sensory. He is brushed, smoothed, fondled, and caressed. The world beyond the window; a world of territorial disputes, raking claws and screams in the night, is unknown to him.

He slinks towards me, arching his back with pleasure and kinking his tail in an attitude of camp affectation.

I bend down to make false friends, and stroke his marvellously fluffy coat, recoiling slightly at his face which appears scrunched right up as though he’s anticipating a sudden impact. He unsqueezes his face and gazes up into mine. As I peer into his, the full hideousness of his visage is revealed. His eyes have a look of pure evil.

Lock him up. Run away, run away.

Ian McEwan. Amsterdam. London: QPD, 1998

2007-04-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

McEwan’s novel about ambition, personal betrayal and revenge features Clive, a modern composer trying to complete a major orchestral work, his friend Vernon, an editor trying to save his ailing newspaper, and Garmony, an unscrupulous right-wing politician on the rise.

In common, all three have, in previous years, been lovers of recently dead Molly. They meet at her funeral and the story follows the next few weeks of the men’s lives. Vernon and Clive act as one another’s conscience, each infuriating the other. Which is more important, honesty, friendship and trust or Vernon’s newspaper and Clive’s symphony?

The novel presents the difficulties of balancing personal and public morality, the importance of private shame and public reputation, the conflict between taking a moral decision for the greater good, or putting first ones own desires.

Not just a simple exposé of a politician with a vulnerable side, Amsterdam is full of double standards and surprises, and takes a long, cynical look at journalism; the competitive, duplicitous nature of men and their political manoeuvring, which is simple Darwinism. Who has the right to survive, who must take the fall?

McEwan includes an interesting section on the creative process; Clive’s absorption and pre-occupation with his work effectively divorces him from the world. His doubt alternates with certainty, and his fear of failure is followed closely by the fleeting sensation of triumph.

The story raises questions as to what is most lasting; the importance men place on career, weighed against the late Molly’s simple acts of trust, kindness, compassion and human dignity. The power of personal relationships; intimacy and friendship, cut through the characters’ take on the grand scheme of things, and reduce to bare bones the significance of a man’s word. Only towards the end of the novel does the significance of the book jacket’s duelling men have meaning, from a time when the integrity of a man’s word meant his honour and his life; and worth defending to the death.

Running ‘till your nipples bleed

2007-04-07T14:46:00.000-07:00

An email from a friend of mine arrives; she complains that, at work, she is routinely subjected to gruesome accounts of female colleagues’ intimate medical procedures and gynaecological problems. I am all commiseration because I, too, have had years of listening to workplace chats about periods, childbirth and sex lives. Oh please.

Later, I wander off for a walk in the early evening sunshine and it is so silent and so beautiful that I flop down on the grass and lay awhile gazing out over the rolling fields, and the mouth of the river, and fall into a reverie. Two men pass by. A few minutes later sounds of women’s talk float nearer and, by the time the two females of the species draw level with me, I have risen up from my deliciously recumbent position in the meadow, alert and tense, something like a meerkat.

“I do feel for her. Going down that IVF route is such an emotional roller coaster. I was never prepared for how terrible it was going to be.”

I remain frozen in my meerkat position as the murmuring recedes. Did I imagine that? What happened to discretion, to modesty? The obsession with periods, childbirth and discussing sex lives is one of the horrors of working in an all-women environment. Is there no escape, not even out in open country? Not surprising that the two men had headed off fast.

Yet what is the first thing I hear at work today? That handfuls of Vaseline are needed to stop my boss’s thighs chafing together, and that great tubs of the stuff are handed out along the Marathon route. He has run so much that his nipples have bled through his shirt, and he has to wear plasters over them, or cover them in dollops of grease. He has huge lardy stains around his man boobs.

As if that was not enough, when I get home, a friend phones and tells me that her rugby playing partner has only half a nipple on one side because, on the pitch in very cold weather, they freeze and the rough shirts rub them off with the friction. Oooh. Women are desperately unlucky to be bothered with the whole damned faulty reproductive system, with its leakages, its prolapses, its yeasty things, its viral things, too much sex, not enough sex, hideous birthing traumas or no births or pregnancies at all but, all these freakish defects are accidents of nature. The men are CHOOSING to chafe their thighs and break their nipples off. That's just weird.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 16

2007-04-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

Everyone wants a bargain. Hell, I do. We’ve got a Victorian end-of-terrace house on at 220K, in need of renovation, and I expect to be killed in the rush. I rather fancy I may have a go at it myself; buy it, do it up and make a few grand.

I’m supposed to meet four parties at the place and we have instructions to go in through the back door because the front door doesn’t open. As I drive by I see a couple peering through the filthy front window so I hope they will find their way round to where I’ll be with the keys.

I find a second couple at the back of the house so the other two parties have looked and run away and, truth be told, it looks quite shocking. The thing to do is to look past the utter rankness of the external and try to visualize the finished project. So, brightly, we start climbing over bits of fallen, rusted iron guttering, all broken into short sections in the yard. The man is walking with a stick so I feel it is judicious to move aside some of these more obstructive pieces of metalwork but I have no secoteurs with which to cut back the self-seeded saplings that have sprung up.

Miss Havisham’s place had nothing on this beauty. We can’t see through the windows but there is a particularly attractive set of stained glass double doors leading to the yard and they are enough to excite me with ideas of rejuvenating the old place and making a feature of them, opening into a light-filled conservatory. I open the door and tiptoe in.

Every wall in the place is covered in blackened wallpaper that looks about fifty years old. The walls have been running damp for some time; possibly condensation, but it’s a ghastly sight. I make my way through the debris to the front door and try to open it, scaring the hell out of the couple out front who think there’s a ‘presence’ in the house that has come to lure them in. Once they come in round the back, we all creep around inside trying not to make contact with the doorframes, and with our bodies shrinking back from inadvertently touching the shredded and filthy curtains.

The front room is large and airy and, upstairs, the bedrooms are large; the front one filled with sunshine. This one room makes all of us start thinking about the possibilities. But, and it’s a huge but, the large cracks all around the ceiling and walls, upstairs and down, give away the sorry state of the gable end, which has slipped downwards about an inch by my reckoning.

Now, to you enthusiasts out there, this may not be such a problem. I have lived in a house older than this with a slipped gable end, which stayed slipped and slipped no more, but the question is whether this is a rebuild or a shoring up. The man with the walking stick bows out politely. The young, energetic couple who fancied a bit of painting and decorating and a new bathroom are fazed but not yet vanquished. Like me, they are smitten with the large rooms. What modern houses have such a luxury of space? And why the bloody hell don’t they?

My problem with this is, as always price. To shore up the gable end, re-roof, plumb, wire, centrally heat, re-plaster, fit kitchen and bathroom, and redecorate will cost anything from 75K upwards. Top price for this terrace is 299K. There’s no such thing as a bargain.

Addendum. The owner's taken this one off the market after over 200 viewings. It's left to rot.

Travel Made Difficult

2007-04-05T02:46:00.000-07:00

Ah, the joys of flying. Enjoy the bracing ten minute walk from the car park to the airport.

Discover the bag you’ve measured does not fit into the little frame for acceptable cabin-sized baggage.

Be confident that you have no dangerous objects such as tweezers, razors or nail scissors. Be prepared to embrace your masculine side and spend your holiday growing big eyebrows and leg hair.

Discover that a sealed carton of non-dairy milk is considered an explosive risk in the cabin.

Pay just £6 to have your bag put in the hold but, before it goes off on the conveyor belt, unpack and re-arrange the contents in order to accommodate said milk, ignoring queue forming behind you.

Be turned back from the departure lounge because you have a sealed carton of fruit juice and a bottle of mineral water to drink in the departure lounge and during the flight, AND to bag up any small vials of perfume or cosmetics.

Return to security having eaten lunch and drunk all liquids, and roll towards the lady who gives you a thorough frisking, with stomach feeling dangerously explosive, and avoiding any sharp objects.

Escape from the loud television and be entertained by infuriating muzak THE WHOLE TIME, even in the loo, and try to not to succumb to air rage before you’ve left the airport.

But, thank heaven, on board, Keane is playing in the cabin, then the Zutons’ ‘Valerie’, and your peevish temper is soothed. The plane is only a quarter full and there is space to recover from hasty liquid lunch.

Forget any frustrations when the plane lines herself up on the runway. The pilot opens up the throttle and off she goes with a little arse wiggle before tearing forward and lifting off as softly as a kiss.

She tucks up her wheels and, below, sigh, dear old England, so beautiful where it is still green. It occurs to me as I fly over Torbay and look down on the treacherous bar stretched across the mouth of the River Teign that, with all our advancement and technology, we could just blow the damned thing up, let the river flow freely out into the wide bay. From up here those waters look so blue, so benign, so deceptive.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 15

2007-04-01T09:26:00.001-07:00

I had an odd visit today. Never mind that the houses that we sell are at the lower end of the market, but I was unprepared.

I meet a young couple buying their first home in an ex-heavy industry area. It’s a tiny terraced cottage and, when I open the door, I take a breath and try not to move far inside. Obviously someone very old has recently died here. The brown, yellow, and orange wildly swirling carpet is an inch deep in filth and dark, sticky looking stains, and it smells.

I try hard not to appear as nauseated as I am feeling and keep looking out of the window where the sun is shining and I can see an apple tree and a line of washing blowing in the Spring breeze.

As I gaze outwards a fat, ugly bulldog waddles past, onto the grass beyond the window and squats down to dump his load onto the garden. I now remember being warned at the office that we had a place on the books where the neighbours’ dogs use the garden of the property for a toilet whilst it’s empty, and I wonder if the young buyers have spotted the stinking mess all over their grass. They are very happy measuring up inside however, and the father, who has come along too, says that our photographs of the interior don’t do the place justice. I look at him twice to see if he is trying to get a rise out of me but he means it.

A noise outside draws my attention back to the window. The neighbours are all outside and there is a ferocious snarling. The tall, and well built man from next door is wrestling a Doberman past the window but it is so huge I am sure it must be a Rottweiler. This has to be the most heavily muscular Doberman I have ever seen, and it is straining against him as it also makes its way to empty its bowel contents onto the grass. I’m getting really anxious now and don’t know whether I should alert the young couple to the dangers of living with a small baby next door to this charming pet.

When we step outside though, the next door neighbours not only have the most charming smiles and friendly faces that I have seen in a long while, but their children are the same.

“Ah, new neighbours!” They beam, and the young couple beam back. Next thing they are all happily engaged in animated conversation and I am dismissed with a wave of their hands. I almost trip over in my haste to get back to the car; I'm not from round 'ere.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 14

2007-03-30T12:34:00.000-07:00

The bad-tempered hibernating bear part of me has been temporarily pacified by the sudden arrival of Spring today. I drive around in my car, wearing sunglasses, with the windows open. The sky is a deep Mediterranean blue and birds are singing in the hedgerows. How soon I forget the misery of the last four months with one burst of warm sun and blue sky. It is the return of hope, like coming up from underground, from the dank, dark, almost suffocating pressure of winter into the light and air. Glory be.

It is even better that each week I show people round these houses, I come into the office the following week to find they are all under offer. Either there’s a shortage of properties or I am a stunning saleswoman.

Every property looks fabulous today, and all the viewers are in sunny moods; outgoing and cheerful. No-one is taciturn and morose. Until I meet Mr Expert at the end of the afternoon but he’s not going to spoil my day. He comes with his old mum to give his second opinion on a place she really likes. I’m disappointed he’s not my age and so I batten down the flirting mechanisms. Don’t blame me; blame the weather. Spring affects women too.

I am polite and helpful but, against his weary cynicism and smiling “I know all about everything but I’m not saying” mien, I am also less chatty. I do rally, and tease him when we get upstairs.

“Come on,” I say, “You’ve been asked to come along here to give your valuable opinion. Let’s hear it,” and look at him with keen interest. Here’s his opportunity to engage and speak about what he knows. He smiles enigmatically and says nothing.

Dear old Mum is all maternal pride and tells me her son’s a builder and he will say what he thinks. But out loud would be quite helpful. Only meeting one anal retentive in a day is quite good.

I am more than compensated for my patience by a HANDSOME man at the next viewing. This is such a rare occurrence that I do behave quite unprofessionally, and I unintentionally adopt a casual, almost shoulder shrugging attitude towards the hideously overpriced property where we meet. He’s great. Good eye contact, nicely spoken, LONG LEGS.

I am introduced to his friend, Brian, and for a minute I think “Of course, the tall, good-looking ones with nice haircuts and an appealing manner are all bloody gay aren’t they?” But I’m wrong. He’s married with two sons. Shucks.

I can clearly adopt whatever careless, aren’t-I-approachable-and-aren’t-we-comfortable attitude as much as I like, but the best ones are taken baby.

Emasculinity

2007-03-30T00:10:00.001-07:00

On the return train there is no dining car layout, instead we have plastic boxes with pre-packed sachets of washed and cut fresh apple, all the way from France, biscuits in wrappers, a bread roll with a smear of filling, and as many drinks as we like. Same company, different style of catering. Why? There is a buffet car though, for the gourmets among us.

The carriage is full of workers, beavering away on their laptops or shouting their importance into mobile phones. I wish they’d shut up. I don’t care who they are or what they said to so-and-so in the meeting. I pity the poor fools that think this qualifies as a life.

A very attractive, and smartly dressed Scotswoman was very loud on her phone on the way up here, on her way to Glasgow after a day of such meetings. I was sitting about ten seats away but, such was her annoyance, her conversation was inescapable.

Not really a conversation, but a diatribe, directed at her son, aged 19, who had a friend that had annoyed her very much by ‘living in our house’ for weeks apparently and had enraged her by calling on her hapless son the preceding evening, which prevented him from studying.

She rants at him for not getting himself a suit. Eventually she makes several other calls, to her husband (where has he been all the while?) and to various shops in Glasgow, before calling their son back with more invective to say he must meet her at the station at 7.00 that night and she will go with him and buy his suit at the Glasgow Fort because everywhere else is closed.

She makes a further phone call to a travel company to pay for this young man’s holiday which he has failed to do.

She calls her son back repeatedly to rail against him for not doing these things himself.

Why would he, when she is going to sort it out for him?

Infantilized, emasculated. By what I wonder.

Fifty years ago this boy, at 19, would have gone off to war, a fighting man, or he may have been apprenticed and working, or a husband or father. What is such a modern young man’s purpose when even the task of consuming is far too onerous? Leave it all to mother.

News and Views

2007-03-27T14:06:00.001-07:00

Michael Buerk chats about Carnage and the Media and says he feels strongly that the public must see real images of the results of violence. He also says that he firmly believes that fictional violence anaesthetizes people against the reality.

It seems to me there is an anomaly here. If fictional violence makes us immune to real violence, then surely repeated exposure to real violence via news reporting will have the same effect.

I have a particular question I want to ask him but there are many hands going up in the auditorium and I don’t get the opportunity until later.

I approach him and ask him if he would mind answering a question I have. I can feel an extraordinary energy from him; the power of his mind. He exudes mental acuity, and it fascinates me how we can sense that. It’s like being next to an engine.

Anyway, I feel very strongly about this particular issue and ask him what he thinks about newspapers printing front page photographs of corpses with their body fluids staining their clothes and pooling on the ground, and dead bodies being shown on television news, both media placed where young children can see them.

He folds his arms tight over his chest, but sees my point immediately. He says that of course televised footage of death and violence should be shown after the 9 o’ clock watershed, adding, ‘If you don’t show such images in order to protect children, then you infantilize the whole population.’

I suggest that the answer is radio, where the facts can be given and the situation described, without the accompanying sensational images. He is not drawn by this suggestion.

Buerk is a passionate believer in showing the public the true horror of war, of terrorism, and of starvation, and he implies that seeing these truths will shake us out of our complacency. I’m not sure. In Britain I do feel there is a strange mismatch between a desire for fictional violence; drama or computer games, and a distaste for real violence.

I am not convinced that fictional violence is always numbing. Our subconscious mind cannot differentiate between what is real and what is not. Fictional violence can therefore make us anxious or even paranoid. It is well recognized that people perceive themselves in danger in such situations as walking home alone, or in isolated places, when the likelihood of being attacked is, in reality, minimal (unless you are a young male, late teens to early twenties, then you should be keeping your wits about you).

Our disgust and abhorrence at REAL corpses and horrifically wounded bomb victims makes us turn away because we are powerless. We cannot stop it; it has already happened. Photojournalism casts us as impotent voyeurs. We feel ineffective, alarmed and frustrated.

We have some power over the televised fictional violence because we have chosen to watch, often knowing that there will be rough stuff, or we can stick to U and PG films. Where computer games are concerned, children have some power when they play such games; they have none when they accidentally see graphic and real violence that they cannot prevent, or suffering that they cannot alleviate.

That sounds as though I think we all have an altruistic gene. I mean that we do not only have ‘fight or flight’ responses, but that our natural urge is either to defend ourselves, help the wounded, or run like hell. With photojournalism we can do none of these things.

I am not a boy and cannot speak for the delight they experience in shooting and killing enemies on screen with a malicious zeal and ease that is startling – until we consider our tribal roots and wonder how we have managed to suppress this instinctive brutality for so long. It does strike a parent oddly having such carnage going on in the living room.

Buerk wants to raise our awareness, and he is right to do so, but my feeling is that journalists and editors need to be scrupulously selective, to make the point that atrocities happen, but not to labour it so that we no longer hear the message.

Cultural Exchange

2007-03-26T13:38:00.000-07:00

The softly spoken, quietly friendly German visitor has hurt his back. He has hobbled into the town and bought some Tiger balm because he feels that heat will help. I suspect he may have a disc prolapse but he is sure it is not so serious. The third time I see him I ask how he is. We’re all a long way from home and a bit of friendly concern can go a long way. Hell, I’d appreciate it.

I am seated at the kitchen table, writing up my notes from the morning. He asks me if I would rub some of the balm into his back. Of course. He is standing before me; my eyes are about level with his stomach. He unbuckles his belt, unzips his jeans, and drops his trousers. They fall to his knees in a moment. I blink and am up, out of my seat, and round behind him in a flash, darting into a safe position with the pot of balm, anxious not to see more than I have already seen.

I am more comfortable with the back of his underwear and, as I compose myself before action, he reaches round and pulls down his underpants. I bravely take a breath and get on with the task, affecting nonchalance as I begin to rub the balm into his back. It doesn’t rub in. It’s horrid, sticky stuff. It’s like trying to massage with cold honey.

I offer him my hot water bottle for the afternoon so he can lie flat and keep warm the sore bit of himself. He offers to cook me dinner tonight but I already have plans. How friendly strangers can be. How good it feels to be unafraid. It occurs to me later what a picture we made, should some hapless individual have strayed into the kitchen to make supper.

Later that evening there is no sign of the poor man. I am concerned. One sighting had him wandering into the kitchen clutching my hot water bottle and looking unwell but no-one has seen him since early evening. I feel he needs my hot water bottle more than my feet do, so I head off to bed, with only my conscience to keep them warm.

I had, however, been telling the attractive man on reception about the surprise at the kitchen table, when all was revealed, which he also found unusual, or highly irregular if we want to be terribly English about it. Then he said ‘the poor man is suffering and we’re laughing at him.’ I wasn’t. Really I wasn’t. Too guilty to sleep now. Misjudged too.

Sisters Under the Skin

2007-03-25T07:10:00.000-07:00

Youth Hostels are great; a huge advance from the boarding houses of a century ago, but working on the same, simple idea. Cheap accommodation for a variety of travellers, all bunked up together – only today the beds are clean and not lice-ridden.

I come into the bunk room and see the window has been opened although it is bitter winter weather outside. I see another bed has been taken. I close the window and chat to my room-mate who is from Germany, over for a National Trust working holiday. Her friends think she’s mad to pay to come to the UK; to work, and eat bad food in bad weather, but she smiles and says she loves everything about England, and that they don’t understand.

I bump into another woman in the kitchen. I look twice to make sure, but it is a woman. Her hair is close cropped; she’s thick set, wearing a round necked black tee-shirt and black straight leg trousers. Her voice is deep, her manner brusque and bluff. I realize that this is the window-opener.

I feel wary because she reminds me of some tough teacher or something from my early teens, and I skip lightly out of the kitchen, strangely aware of my body and my long hair swinging.

I talk with her later that evening and I’m partly right in my assessment of toughness; she thinks clearly, has strong and intelligent opinions; she is forthright and uncompromising. I’m not interested in her private life but I am interested in why my initial reaction is a hurdle that has to be jumped before we can interact as human beings, mindless of each other’s sexuality. When laid aside and a conversation enjoyed, who cares?

A shallow, disappointingly superficial part of me feels nervously aware that I was seen walking with her into the kitchen – because as we walked in, glances were exchanged.

Now please, these people have made assumptions. I could see it. I’m now the woman-woman and she’s been cast as the man-woman. Look. We’re not together. Really. We’re just sleeping together tonight. It’s a hostel thing.

The Book Signing

2007-03-24T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Literature Festival is a jolly affair. Hordes of animated, chattering people are everywhere and there is a warm, friendly atmosphere. Strangers talk to each other as if they were old friends, all brought together by the love of writing, reading and the opportunity to hear about and discuss a wide range of topics: History, Philosophy, Travel, Humour, News and loads besides.

My task this week is to chat to as many writers as I can and try to get an understanding of how they feel about attending festivals such as these, and why Literature Festivals have grown in popularity over recent years, such that they are now the main marketing method for publishers (so I am told).

Each author I approach is delighted to be there, and see it as an opportunity to meet their readers, to socialize with other writers, and to enjoy the scenery of the Lake District. It’s a stimulating mini-break for writers and an escape from slaving alone over a desk in an isolated garret.

I have lugged two enormous hardback tomes written by Judith Flanders (and very good they are too) which are the products of her research into Victorian society in England. I thought I may as well get her to sign them as we were both going to be in the same place, and she was signing books anyway. I did think twice about this because they are both almost the size of breeze blocks, and my suitcase was already heavy but, why not? They’re excellent reads and I’m sure she’ll be delighted that I have bought two.

She strides onto the platform wearing casual straight leg trousers and a sweater. Her hair is scraped back and pinned tight. She delivers her talk and walks off stage to sit at the signing table in the foyer. I smile brightly and romp up to the table proffering my hefty volumes and ask her to sign them. She looks down, signs her name, and frowns as I speak.

“Would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?”

She frowns harder and glares at me. She continues signing other people’s books without looking up. She looks down, signs, pushes the books back away from her. I wait.

When the book profferers have all gone I step forward again, smiling with all the charm I can muster and say, “I’m doing a project on Literature Festivals. Can I ask you what are the benefits of attending?”

Her face is pinched up, “To sell more books!” She scowls hard. I move back a few inches.

She stares ferociously at me. “Who are you?! Why are you asking me questions?!”

I move back a step.

I explain as gently as I can so not to alarm her. It’s a small project for a local University and we’re interested in how books are marketed and promoted, that’s all.

She continues glaring but there is a miniscule lessening of the tension, “It’s just part of the deal – it’s not what I want to be doing.”

I try to look understanding and non-threatening.

“The publishers ask me to do it!”

I make a concerned sort of face but, really, I am bewildered. “Do you have to do many then?”

“I do so many a year, to sell more books!”

I feel sympathetic now, “So would you prefer to stick to the research?”

“It’s for the readers, it’s NOT what I do.”

She hates me, but I am brave and venture one more question; that is whether sales are noticeably improved.

“It is impossible to say if sales are increased,” she barks and, with that I retreat.

Not really her scene then.

I need some air.

The Tea Ceremony

2007-03-23T11:03:00.000-07:00

I’m on the train to Cumbria for the Literature Festival on the shores of Derwentwater. Strangely, a first class single is cheaper than a return ticket but I’m not complaining, and am looking forward to the promised free tea and coffee all the way there – five hours. I step into the compartment but, seeing that is laid up like a dining car, I retreat, and look in the next compartment. No, I was right the first time; I am to travel for five hours with a table in front of me, laid with a French style heavy paper mat, cutlery wrapped in a blue serviette, a wine glass and a white china dish containing a white china cup on a doily. I try to make some room for my papers, and manage to write a bit amongst the crockery and cutlery.

I am soon joined by two Chinese men who smile and bob their heads at me and, by gesticulating, indicate that they want to know if the seats are taken – they’re not – and if they may sit down. They sit and chatter with great animation and good nature, and I smile and nod too, then get back to my paperwork.

The steward/hostess passes amongst us with a trolley offering tea or coffee. Very civilized I feel. However, I am a non-caffeine type so I ask for a pot of hot water. The steward pours out tea for the visitors and they pick up their cups with both hands, and slurp the liquid slowly from the cups. I wonder if I can listen to that for five hours.

My hot water arrives. The two Chinamen watch very pointedly as the steward places the metal pot in front of me, then as I unzip my rucksack and rummage noisily inside it to produce a teabag. They appear fascinated at my ritual as I drop it into the pot and return to my writing.

Some minutes later one of them makes a sound. I look up. He nods at the teapot and picks it up to offer it to me. He is going to pour my tea. How thoughtful. He pours out a cup for me and I say thank you. Then, he pours a cup for his friend and one for himself. I am puzzled by this but I assume that sharing my decaffeinated tea is a gesture of friendship so I smile and say clearly, “It’s Rooibosch.” They are all incomprehension. I try again, “It’s from Africa.” They look crestfallen and shake their heads to show they do not understand. I wonder how they are going to manage in this country, and how they got this far but they look very jolly, and must be getting by with smiles and nods wherever they go.

Half an hour later, the steward returns with the trolley on what is to prove a trip of unrelenting mouth filling, and offers us all soft drinks. I have cold water, my fellow travellers have lemonade and water. They look mighty delighted at the English train service, and I’m pretty astonished at it myself. The journey is punctuated by what seems to be half hourly intervals by the arrival alongside my seat of stewards offering delicious looking pitta or naan breads stuffed with all manner of delicacies, served with parsnip crisps, and bowls of comforting soup with hunks of bread. If I had eaten any, or all of it, I would have rolled off the train and needed a lie down.

Ten minutes later comes the spoiler. The ticket collector sweeps through the train without a smile, in fact, rather aggressive I think, even towards me, as though I have a terrific nerve to be in first class and, for a moment I feel I ought to confess that this is my first time and would he please treat me gently. He glares at the happy Chinese men and orders them out of first class and into standard.

They clearly do not understand a word but they do understand his big pointy finger.

Interior Life of an Estate Agent. Part 13

2007-03-22T00:13:00.000-07:00

I meet young first time buyers at a tiny nutshell of a cottage, new on the market at 120K. The sitting room appears too small for a sofa – a deal table and a couple of chairs would have been a luxury when the old place was built. Upstairs there is just one room, not even a landing and, as we discuss the best way round to put the bed, I am quite wistful. What a precious and unforgettable time this is; buying a first home together, and I’m very anxious that they only go ahead with it if they’re sure; I want to minimize life’s pitfalls for them, or to delay them awhile. I emphasize the need for a full survey, point out the woodworm, and suggest they go away and talk it over for the weekend. It’s a dear little love nest but the price still has to be right, and unforeseen problems revealed – so love doesn’t get too battered too early.

There’s an offer of 385 K in for a huge but shoddily built place out in the country. Over six months on the market, frequent viewers all thinking it’s overpriced because of all the work that needs doing, yet what is the owner’s response? Is it whoopee, yes, I’ll take it, because this offer is firm, the people have nothing to sell and can go ahead quickly, and break open the champagne? No. The owners don’t accept the offer. It occurs to them that, now that there’s some interest, the price needs to go up to reflect the length of time it has been waiting to sell, and want another 10K.

The prospective purchasers are fairly game, considering, raise their offer another 5K, and sensibly say that’s their limit. I hope they don’t budge. Gift Horse. Mouth. They've got high standards; they’ll do the work properly, rip out all the tat and bodged jobs, and make something of the place, if they don’t get messed about by a greedy seller. Or it’ll stay on the market another six months. People are jolly interesting. I had fifteen minutes for lunch today. Fab. And it was sunny.